The particular social condition Baldwin diagnoses in his essays is the same one that makes the creation of a fictional world virtually impossible for a Negro novelist. His essays subtly explore the ambiguities and ironies of a life lived on two levels—that of the Negro, and that of the man—and they have spoken eloquently to and for a whole generation. But Baldwin's feelings about the condition—alternating moods of sadness and bitterness—are best expressed in the paradoxes confronting the haunted heroes of his novels and stories. (p. 169)

The possible modes of existence for anyone seeking refuge from a society which refuses to acknowledge one's humanity are necessarily limited, and Baldwin has explored with some thoroughness the various emotional and spiritual alternatives available to his retreating protagonists….

Harvey Breit has likened [Go Tell it On the Mountain] to Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but it seems to me, both in its strengths and weaknesses, to be much closer to another great autobiographical novel, [D. H. Lawrence's] Sons and Lovers. Baldwin is perhaps not Lawrence's equal in his ability to realise the physical presence of the world of objects—there is too much of [Charles] Dickens in his descriptions—but John Grimes' response to the suffocating world of his childhood reminds one very strongly of Paul Morel….

John, like Paul Morel, turns away from the pain and pressure of his immediate environment in search of "unimaginable glories," and the last section of the novel, 'The Threshing Floor', dramatises the battle that is waged in his soul between God and the Devil, the flesh and the spirit, the temple and the world. Like Lawrence, Baldwin falters before the mystical experience he tries to describe and we are left at the end with only words; words which are used repetitively, rhythmically, symbolically, and sensuously, but not successfully, to convey the transcendental experience. It is difficult not to read Go Tell it On the Mountain in the light of Baldwin's own brief but intense experience of salvation and worship, as he tells of it in The Fire Next Time. But within the created world of the novel the resolution lacks conviction, having been artistically undermined by the long, central section in which the past lives of John's father, mother and aunt are presented naturalistically with a wealth of social and psychological detail. In the novel, spiritual and social facts do not have the same ineluctable connection that they assume in the essay….

Baldwin's attempt to substitute Eros for Caritas, first in Giovanni's Room and then in Another Country, is a failure, not because he makes the mistake that Lawrence did, of trying to hypostatize the physical in the metaphysical, but because he drains the sexual act of reality by using it as the vehicle for a variety of metaphors. (p. 173)

What Baldwin seems to have arrived at in his first three novels, is the painful discovery that there is no other country. Mountains and tiny, cluttered rooms are both, in their different ways, uninhabitable. (p. 176)

The autobiographical elements in Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone are not very well concealed. Baldwin, like Leo, is a "fat cat" now, and this novel is, in a sense, his Big Deal [the title of the movie in which Leo achieves his breakthrough]. It is not a great novel. In some ways it is not as good as those he wrote previously—certainly it lacks the intensity of much of his earlier writing. What has been gained, though, is ultimately more important. One of Baldwin's constant complaints has been that the Negro has been deprived of his language, and he has written, therefore, like a man trying to invent his own; sacrificing, in the attempt, truth to rhetoric. Now he seems to have realised the futility of this, and has decided to come to terms with the only language he can have. Consequently he has written a novel with the truth in it: the work of "an honest man and a good writer." (p. 179)