Cane is not a typical novel. It is, in fact, sui generis—a unique piece of writing in American literature as well as in the entire scope of Third World writing. I suggest that Cane should be regarded as a lyrical novel—a narrative structured by images instead of the traditional unities. Its tripartite structure is developed from a series of thematic tensions: North/South; city/country (with the almost ubiquitous image of the land); past/present; black/white; male/female. Structured by these counterparts or tensions, Cane achieves a lyrical beauty and power which make it, for me, the most compelling novel ever written by a black American writer. (pp. 30-1)

The most fascinating aspect of Toomer's novel for me is … the narrator-observer who wanders throughout the book. This is the author's emotional center, for the fact is that Cane does have a central character—a figure who resembles Toomer himself, though cleverly disguised. In the course of the narrative he undergoes a number of metamor-phoses, sometimes appearing as a first-person narrator (in 12 of the 28 sections of the first two parts), that is, as a participant in the activities described; or as an observer in a third-person narrative, like Conrad's Marlow. In two other main sections ("Bona and Paul" and "Kabnis") Toomer has disguised himself as the mulatto who cannot decide whether he should be black or white, thus introducing the theme of passing. Cane, then, may be regarded as the story of Jean Toomer's own vacillation between races—a rather common theme of American fiction during the 1920s….

It is, of course, one of the great ironies of Toomer's life that his book fulfilled his artistic intentions though Toomer himself was unable to accept this heritage. One suspects that the publication of Cane must have acted as a kind of exorcism, bringing Toomer's own identity problems to a climax…. Toomer's personal vacillation between black and white damaged his own psyche beyond repair. Darwin T. Turner is correct when he says that in the end Toomer did not identify himself as a Caucasian any more than he did as an Afro-American, that he was "self-exiled from all races." Cane was his swan song, yet if Toomer in the long run was unable to accept his mixed heritage, there is little doubt that Cane has made it possible for others to find theirs. (The last scene in the novel—a symbolic sunburst surrounding Father John and Halsey's younger sister, Carrie Kate—is, in fact, a resounding affirmation of blackness.)

The novel, however, remains. Its influence on subsequent black writing cannot be denied—especially on the writers who wrote during the last years of the Harlem Renaissance, in the '20s and '30s. Yet its significance is much more than this, for Cane is one of the most innovative works of 20th-century American fiction—a landmark in American literature, foreshadowing the soon-to-follow experimental works of John Dos Passos and William Faulkner. The experimental novel in America begins not with those writers but with Jean Toomer's Cane. (p. 32)