The article explores the meanders of this very long novel (more than 700 pages) in order to analyse the various stages in its narrator's metamorphosis from witness to murderer, a complex three-fold process. Although the full revelation promised by the title has the reader expect an extensive account of America's Civil War from the Southern point of view, on this historical plane already Lucy (the narrator) dons the roles both of confessor and confessant, since the evocation of the war leads her to broach the subject of slavery, a public crime in whose guilt she shares with all white people. Central though the Civil War be to the novel, the reader however soon realizes that the real fighting and killing happen on another front, that of the text itself. Indeed, it is a real war that Lucy, as a female narrator, wages: a war against the patriarchal discourse that has dominated Southern life and literature for decades. The second part of this article thus analyses the strategies devised by Allan Gurganus, a white male author whose status as a gay writer places him on the side of minorities, to turn his female narrator into a symbolic murderer. When, in a final twist, Lucy kills her husband in an act of self-defense, the symbolic "textual" murder is, as it were, actualized and Lucy's metamorphosis from witness and confident into murderer completed. The narrative is turned, in extremis, into the first-hand confession of a woman criminal, yet a confession which, we contend, belies the usual characteristics of penitent telling, yet another twist in this winding and troubling tale.