The novel begins with the crisis in the life of Quasheba over how she can save her daughter from her own mother's fate: rape by a syphilitic white plantation owner and the inevitable, humiliating, painful death that will follow. Her rebellion plunges those around her into their own crises of choice.
Die the Long Day explores both the reality of evil and the point at which the self-crippling resentments of the oppressed can become, as Albert Camus argued in The Rebel, the liberating power of revolt. Die the Long Day is a novel which draws on Orlando Patterson's groundbreaking research into the social and psychological lives of enslaved people in his The Sociology of Slavery (1967), but which brings imagination to go beyond the documentary reality of his historical study to offer the reader both a powerful entry into the minds of his characters, and as David Scott has written, "a space for moral thinking". Again, as Scott has argued, it is a novel which is as essential and as fully engaged with the profound preoccupations of Orlando Patterson's distinguished career as a historical thinker in establishing the origins of the Western values in freedom in the context of the enslavement of African peoples in the New World. It is one of the rich ironies of the novel that one of the most complex enslaved characters is called Cicero -- reminding us that the Roman writer (bc 103- bc46) after whom he is sarcastically named by his "owner", was one of the earliest theorists of political freedom -- and also the "owner" of enslaved people.
As the New York Times wrote in its contemporary review: "Orlando Patterson in Die the Long Day, a novel set on a Jamaican sugar plantation in the 18th century, throws new light on this unstable situation and on the subtleties of the master‐slave relationship. In so doing, he gives a better understanding of contemporary West Indian society. For it is as if this society is bent on proving that those who ignore the past will be forced to relive it; as if the passing of two centuries has only deepened the conflicts, by presenting them over and over again in different guises."
