In a difficult or disorganized structure, illustrating fused time, The Big Sea interweaves the themes of paradox and eternality.

The Big Sea preserves a history of events less well than a history of persons…. Often giving historical fact, [Hughes] has his own loose and confusing way of presentation…. Actually the history of the work stretches from Hughes's birth in 1902 to the death of A'Lelia Walker in 1931 and the Scottsboro case of the same year….

Just as it reminds one of literary history, The Big Sea reminds one of the Western Movement, which characterized America in the 1800s and which ended in the 1890s. (p. 39)

His movement to Lincoln, Illinois, in 1916 is an example of the great migration of that decade, when Blacks pulled up roots in the South and journeyed north in hope of better jobs and better pay. His family becomes a symbol of all the restless and wandering Blacks then….

This work, moreover, preserves not only the social realities of its time, but the contemporary literature…. Viewing literary figures through The Big Sea allows the reader to experience time multi-dimensionally, to see the new poetry movement of 1912 through the eyes of Hughes the narrator, who becomes twenty-one in 1923….

One reads The Big Sea less for its recording of the discriminations against Blacks after World War I than for its recording of Blacks' accomplishments during the Harlem Renaissance….

In The Big Sea one finds preserved the paradox of both white and Black America during these 1920s. Especially vivid and biting is the portrait of the Black middle class in Washington…. Too often the autobiographical self of The Big Sea withdraws, and refuses to judge, but not here….

The Big Sea records a world in which Black snobbishness coexists with Black art….

In the last seventy-seven pages, especially, Hughes preserves the different tones of the Renaissance—humor, sadness, and irony. (p. 40)

Since the chronology of The Big Sea bewilders one, the reader interested merely in historical fact should look elsewhere…. Such a reader will lose something in the change, however, for The Big Sea preserves more than dates: it records colorful biography, the important people of an important time. (p. 41)

The Big Sea portrays Wallace Thurman and Zora Hurston more completely than it does Langston Hughes; for it creates a detached self, a Hughes that belongs in successful fiction—not the engaged self that should characterize skillful autobiography. This is a significant distinction, for the first self subordinates its identity to the observation of others and to the dramatic situations encountered; the second self, on the contrary, interprets both events and persons…. Memoir, however, is less a process of this human reaction and awareness than a writer's objective record of his times…. The Big Sea is a memoir. (p. 42)

It would be an oversimplification, however, to say, as George Kent does, that Hughes wrote two autobiographies without revealing himself. Since Hughes does show himself partly in The Big Sea, it is more accurate to make the distinction above. Although one catches rare glimpses of Hughes the man, this narrator often withdraws into obscurity and silence—leaves the reader on his own to make sense out of social or historical disorder. (pp. 42-3)

Hughes passes up two opportunities to create a distinct autobiographical self. His break with his patron, the major crisis of the book, is one. (p. 43)

In an enduring moment, Hughes chooses to lose many amenities of the world, but to regain his soul. Yet he never articulates this awareness.

Hughes's argument with Hurston over Mule Bone, the folk play on which they collaborated, provides a second opportunity [to create an autobiographical self], but again he withdraws from the necessary engagement and interpretation….

Although leaving these questions unanswered, The Big Sea preserves many of the moral values that inform Langston Hughes's literary world. (p. 44)