This event creates the present tense setting for the novel, which is mostly narrated in retrospect, explaining each relationship with a story from the actor's life.

Caleb, Leo's brother, a World War II vet, was falsely imprisoned when he was a young man, and eventually conquers his anger at white society through his conversion to fundamentalist Christianity.

White male critics, such as Mario Puzo, tended to suggest that Baldwin's politics had compromised its literary merits.

[3] The "absolute inadequacy and overall misguided nature of this initial response" has been discussed by Lynn O. Scott, who wrote that this contemporary critical reception reflected white Americans' decreasing sympathy with the Civil Rights movement during the late 1960s in the face of increasing militancy and assertions of Black Power, with which Baldwin was associated.

However, she argues that these novels build upon, revise, and refocus his previous considerations of racial and sexual identity in America by "exploring the sources of personal and cultural resistance to the pressures of a deforming context" rather than "mapping the experience of internalized racism and homophobia".