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Truman Capote's first and most widely acclaimed novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms germinated in a mind deeply concerned with the power of darkness. Heaped with dreadful psychologies and nightmare terrors, it comes near to resembling a Gothic romance, stylistically nocturnal in the best tradition. It is a complicated work of many motifs, themes and sub-themes, a work which in the fourteen years since its publication has fallen victim to a variety of critical interpretations best described as tenuous.
John Aldridge was the first critic of Other Voices to exploit the theme of a boy's search for a father. Aldridge also utilizes, and within limits he is correct, the parallel sub-theme of a boy's “struggle to grow out of the dreamworld of childhood and to enter the real world of manhood.” (1) More recently, Ihab Hassan has exhumed and labeled the Narcissus theme as being the “central” and “unifying impulse,” not only of Other Voices, Other Rooms, but of the whole of Capote, literary and personal. Undoubtedly Hassan has dug closest to the primal root of meaning in his detailed elaboration of Joel Harrison Knox's search for “an image which reflects darkly his own identity, his reality.” (2) But even Hassan's interpretation is not complete focus. For Hassan, like Aldridge before him, has (with typical critical impatience) clutched a handy sub-theme, (3) has sincerely though mistakenly labeled it the primary theme, and been consequently led into formulating an off-center value judgment concerning the work as a whole.
It is not the intention of this writer to exercise a literary