hat most literary critics comment on is her novel "We Have Always Lived in a Castle".Literary critic, Granville Hicks wrote that, "We Have Always Lived in a Castle" showed Jackson at her most skillful,making the not quite credible as real as this typewriter of mine. It also suggests, perhaps a little more ruefully than wascustomary with Miss Jackson, some desperate truths about mankind"(31). "Miss Jackson was certainly not the firstwriter to assert that there is evil in everybody, but what might be merely a platitude becomes a great truth because of thedepth and consistency of her own feeling about life and because she was so extraordinarily successful in making herreaders feel what she felt. She plunges the reader into a world of her creating and leaves him wondering about what hehas always believed to be the real world"(32). Geoffrey Wolff points out that "the secret of her art in this novel is her'comfort' in describing 'those things that happen'. The madness is so tangled with the ordinary that we cannot shrug itaway or hide from it. The blatant symbols-poison, the garden, the collective will of the community, the inherited housecleaned by fire-are not things and ideas that stand for something other than themselves. Rather they are the life of thenovel. In Freud's lexicon, the dream, or nightmare, is an allegory of hidden motives. In Miss Jackson's novel, thenightmare lives on the surface, so terrifying because it seems so ordinary."(18) Jackson's first novel, "The RoadThrough the Wall"(1948), "chronicles the collapse of a small community due to its own inner demonic contradictions.By focusing upon a whole neighborhood, rather than upon a single violated protagonist as in her other novels, the novelcreates an effective metaphor or microcosm for the tensions inherent in the culture in the postwar period. Moreover,whether the protagonist is individual or collective, the novel adumbrates and begins exploration of one of Jackson'sprimar...
