The continuing battle which Baldwin has waged with the spirit of Richard Wright, a battle which started in 1949 with the publication of his essay, 'Everybody's Protest Novel', is symptomatic of that tension which he was later to see, more sympathetically, in [Langston] Hughes's poetry. As evidence of this tension within his own work on the one hand he admits to a determinism not essentially different from Wright's and admits that 'we cannot escape our origins, however hard we try' while on the other he generalises from this and seeks to find in the Negro's experience an archetype for the human condition…. It is Baldwin's ability to maintain this distinction in his novels which raises his work above the naïve absolutism of Wright's. This does not imply that as a novelist he abandons faith in the validity of his own experience but that this experience is seen in the broader context of the human condition…. It is [his] ability to penetrate beyond the immediacies of injustice and prejudice … which marks his work off from that of those writers for whom the novel is an extension of the pamphlet. Like Arthur Miller he is concerned with man rather than men and the savage perception which characterises his essays survives now with the added depth and perspective of the artist. (pp. 126-28)

[We] might be forgiven for detecting [echoes of Albert Camus in Blues for Mr. Charlie]. For the grotesque code of honour which brings Richard and Lyle into direct confrontation is as arbitrary and irrational as that implacable plague which settled on Camus' Oran, while the two responses to this irrational suffering are typified in Baldwin's play by Meridian and Richard as they are in Camus' novel [The Plague] by Father Paneloux and Rieux. The one places faith in resignation or the positive power of love; the other in revolt. The parallel serves to emphasise too the crisis of faith which is the background not only to this play but also to most Negro novels and drama. As Camus' characters reject a God who can permit or even will purposeless suffering so Baldwin's characters rebel against a religion which preaches passivity and yet which can be made to endorse violence…. Yet the dialogue which Baldwin wages with himself, through the person of Richard, remains finally unresolved. For where Rieux had contained his revolt within a determination to heal, Richard's death is a gesture of rebellion not essentially different from the 'unrewarding rage' which had led Bigger Thomas to strike out against the white world. Baldwin has always been supremely conscious of the rage with which the Negro confronts the white world and has insisted that 'the first problem is how to control that rage so that it won't destroy you.' The dilemma in which he finds himself in Blues for Mr. Charlie is that Richard's rage is the substance of his rebellion and if it destroys him it also constitutes his strength. For while the white world can afford to ignore and persecute the non-violent demonstrators organised by Meridian it cannot avoid the direct challenge represented by Richard and if that challenge leads inevitably to his death then there is a logic to that progression as disturbing but as direct as that which governed Bigger Thomas's career. (pp. 130-31)

As in both [Lorraine] Hansberry's and [LeRoi] Jones's work the white liberals are the special targets for criticism. This is true also of Baldwin's The Fire Next Time in which he attacks them on the grounds that 'they could deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man' for their attitudes, he claims, have little connexion 'with their perceptions of their lives, or even their knowledge."… Parnell is guilty, not of racism but of the fault which Baldwin had identified in his essay. He sees the crime in terms of abstract values. He is committed to justice and equality but not to involvement in the details of inhumanity…. Yet more fundamentally Parnell's stance is undermined by Baldwin's insistence on its sexual origin. For his liberalism appears to have stemmed from a youthful love affair with a Negro girl, an affair which has left in its wake an obsessive concern with Negroes which in reality owes little to a humanistic impulse…. At the trial … Parnell betrays the Negro cause and the justice to which he had been committed by covering up a lie told by Lyle's wife. While he regrets this immediately after the trial his positive espousal of the Negro side, which climaxes the play, can hardly be taken as a sign that there is any justification for Meridian's faith. If Baldwin genuinely wishes to 'bear witness to the reality and the power of light' he would have done better to allow Parnell the integrity which alone could grant a validity to his final decision. One is left finally, then, with a contradiction which, while it may accurately reflect the contemporary dilemma of Negro and white liberal, subverts Baldwin's declared faith. For if the logic of the final scene is seemingly dedicated to the validity of passive resistance, gathering to itself the genuinely committed, the force of Richard's death and the sad reality of liberal 'commitment' would seem to deny this logic. In a genuine attempt to avoid facile resolution Baldwin allows conscious ambiguity to degenerate into moral and dramatic confusion. (pp. 133-34)

[It] is rather [Baldwin's] inability to draw a valid picture of the victim and his immediate society which ironically proves the source of the play's failure. For if some of the white characters tend to the stereotype they are at least drawn with a panache and a conscious irony which compensates for a lack of insight, while the precision of his satire is for the most part balanced with a perceptive humanity which grants to Lyle and his wife a reality denied to Richard and Juanita whose relationship is never convincingly established. For his inability to distinguish between rhetoric and genuine language has the effect of undermining the credibility of those Negro characters to whom he attributes a pretentious eloquence. (pp. 134-35)

Baldwin's chief fault lies, therefore, not so much in his dehumanisation of the whites as in his sentimentalising of the Negroes. (p. 135)

[In Amen Corner] Baldwin had attained to that same sense of objectivity and universality which he evidences in Another Country. Less squarely centred on the racial conflict it evidences something of that vital compassion which is to be found in Lorraine Hansberry's work….

[Something] of Baldwin's failure in [Blues for Mr. Charlie] stems from his inability to master the dramatic form. Like [John] Dos Passos in the thirties he was drawn to the theatre because it offered a platform for his views and a direct rapport between writer and audience not available to the novelist. Here he could publicly work out a compromise between the contradictory responsibility of the Negro writer. The crude monologues of the third act of Blues for Mr. Charlie highlight, however, the difficulty of the novelist turned playwright. Denied the opportunity to develop character and motive at length he is easily tempted into radical simplification. (p. 136)