Dragon (Band)

Jack Burden, Warren's prototypical protagonist, proceeds from an ironic vision of an alienated self in a mechanized world to a compassionate, yet terrifying understanding of human and cosmic interdependence: "…and soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time." Warren's meditations on history and the individual's relationship to historical process invariably brought him to a consideration of slavery and its impact on the individual, particularly the white Southerner. The historical novel Band of Angels (1955), with its focus on the Civil War and the consequences of miscegenation, and the experimental Brother to Dragons (1953; rev. 1979), with its imagina-415- tive exploration of Thomas Jefferson's response to his kinsmen's ax murder of a slave, demonstrate Warren's commitment to untangling the complicated racial heritage and conflicted moral agency of individuals functioning within a closed social and political system ...»