Experience and Culture in William Styron’s American Post-War.pdf

Culture is the sum of attitudes that belongs to a certain society, it “is an inclination to think, view and act in certain ways toward relevant objects”. This definition emphasizes emotional aspects within the trinity of the cognitive, emotional and behavioral facets of culture” (Wexler, 177). Against this view the research question of this study aims at revealing that the dialectic forces of history and society affected the American culture, a culture which produced typical hypocrite and immoral parents like Helen and Milton and lost children like Peyton. This culture with its “cancerous religiosity” putting “manners before morals” is a dissolving culture pitifully unable to redeem itself.

According to Edward Gibbon the fall of the American culture is caused by the rapid increase in the undermining of the sanctity of the family, the mounting craze for pleasure and entertainment as in the brutalization of sports, the gigantic armament and the failure to realize that the real enemy lay in the moral decay of its people, the decay of religion and the fading faith leaving people without a guide. The research question of this study is to analyze the aspects of the American society’s dissolution, as seen in “Lie Down in Darkness” leading to alienation and revulsion of the self as well as the dissolve of the hero and the creation of the anti-hero.