Go Down, Moses

As most commentators agree, Faulkner’s fiction displays his keen observation of the Mississippi landscape and its people, of its history and poverty, its resistance to modernization, its social manners and customs, its politics and economics, and, most acutely and powerfully, its long-standing and culture-defining racial problems. Especially in four novels—Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses, and Intruder in the Dust—he wrote with compassion and discernment about the ugly legacies of slavery, the plantation system, the divisions of the Civil War, sharecropping, the terrifying ordeals of lynching in the Jim Crow South, and the extremely complicated family entanglements of the white and black descendants of slaveholding patriarchs who seemed to take for granted not just economic exploitation of their slaves, but sexual exploitation as well. Though Faulkner himself had a complicated relationship with this culture, he was intelligent and compassionate enough to learn from his own observations that he could no longer separate himself as a citizen from the racial injustices that continued to plague his Mississippi and his South. In the mid-fifties he undertook a series of public lectures and essays that addressed racial problems as he understood them, in the hope that he could encourage the South to avoid the bloodshed that he feared was inevitable if the region did not give African Americans fair and just legal and political opportunities. After several futile years of political pronouncements, he went back to writing novels.

Go Down, Moses reaches deep into the heart of Mississippi’s racial problems, both historical and contemporary, with its parallel stories of two descendants of Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin (Old Carothers), the white patriarch of the McCaslin family. The novel focuses on Isaac McCaslin, his white grandson, and Lucas Beauchamp, his part-black grandson. Isaac, the rightful inheritor of the McCaslin plantation, has complicated reasons for wanting to renounce his birthright in the plantation, arguing with his cousin and foster father McCaslin Edmonds (Cass) that only by renouncing the ownership of property can the South erase the legacy of slavery, since slavery caused the exploitation of God’s natural world. Isaac is ashamed of Old Carothers’s miscegenous union with at least one, and perhaps two, of his own slaves. Lucas, a generation older than Isaac and the product of Old Carothers’s dalliance with one of his slaves, is paradoxically proud of his relationship to Old Carothers and thinks Isaac is weak for giving up the land that he, Lucas, would love to own.

Woven into and around these two parallel narratives are supporting narratives of hunting and drinking, of gambling and lynching, of marriage and sexuality, of public attitudes and private longings, of love and hate, all inextricably mixed with each other and with the families involved.

How to Read Faulkner

Because Faulkner has been branded a "difficult" writer, many readers, even otherwise good readers, have given up trying to read him even before they have started. In many ways, Faulkner is difficult, if only because he makes extraordinary demands on his readers, always with the effort to involve readers in the story he is telling. The main rule in reading Faulkner is this: don’t worry if you don’t understand everything the first time you read it. Things happen on page 3 that even the best readers in the world can’t understand until they have read page 300. Faulkner does not want readers not to understand everything at once. Instead, he wants readers to experience his characters’ sensibilities in order to understand their reactions to things that happen to them. He wants readers to juggle several narrative balls at once, to hold two or more narratives in suspension at the same time. In The Sound and the Fury, for example, he does not describe the first narrator’s mental deficiencies; he works to make the reader experience his world. Unlike traditional novelists, like Charles Dickens, say, Faulkner does not explain things, does not introduce families by describing all their relationships; he lets that information, and other important information and explanations, accumulate in what might seem random moments interspersed throughout the narrative. He claimed that he didn’t write his books to be read, but to be reread! Whether you take Faulkner’s advice or not—whether you read Go Down, Moses once or twice or three times—you should relax and enjoy the immediate genius of his language, if nothing else. Be in the moment on every page, savor every phrase, even if you don’t understand it. Reading William Faulkner is not always easy, but it is always astonishing and rewarding.

Questions for Reading and Discussion

This curiously titled chapter exists in an earlier version Faulkner titled "Almost." What do you think he wanted to convey by changing the title? "Was" as a title suggests the novel’s brooding concern with history, and as you read you would do well to keep in mind how Faulkner keeps the idea of history in the foreground of the novel: through stories like this one that take place in a previous time, through family histories, through legend and oral tradition, and through written documents such as the ledgers that Isaac reads in part 4 of "The Bear" for what he thinks they reveal to him of his own family’s history. Why does Faulkner have Cass, rather than an omniscient narrator, tell "Was"? What kind of portrait of Isaac’s parents, their courtship, and of Isaac’s conception, does Cass’s telling give Isaac? The broad parody Cass uses to tell him about his mother may also suggest that we should pay close attention to other women in the nearly all-male world of Go Down, Moses. How does the poker game, by which Uncle Buddy saves Uncle Buck (Isaac’s to-be father) from marriage this time, affect our reading of Isaac’s claim to Cass, in part 4 of "The Bear" that he, Isaac, was predestined by God from the beginning of time to rid the world of racism?

At the core of "The Fire and the Hearth" are the marriage between Lucas and Molly Beauchamp and their "home," symbolized by the year-round fire that Lucas keeps burning in the hearth. What troubles their marriage? How does their union differ from other unions, marriages or liaisons, throughout the novel? As you read "Pantaloon" you might keep in mind certain similarities and differences between George Wilkins, Lucas’s son-in-law-to-be, and Rider. At the end of the novel you should be able to generalize about the differences between white families and black families.

Most discussions of this story center on Rider’s relationship with his wife, Mannie, and on the deputy’s misunderstanding of what he sees when Rider is dragged from the jail. But look a little closer at the deputy, too. He is ostensibly talking to his wife, who is clearly not listening. So to whom is he really talking? Perhaps to himself? If so, why? What’s at stake for him in his monologue? "Pantaloon" has no obvious narrative relationship to the other stories in Go Down, Moses, but its location at the novel’s structural center, where it serves as a sort of bridge between the Lucas Beauchamp stories and the Isaac McCaslin stories, might suggest that Faulkner intended it to have a special place in the novel’s meanings. What thematic relationships does it have with the other parts of the novel?

Ostensibly an "initiation" story, "The Old People" also gives us a look at the traditions and rituals that are such an important part of hunting among the people of north Mississippi. What is the significance of Sam Fathers’s name? What part does he play in indoctrinating Isaac about the meaning of the wilderness? What are his ideas? What about the deer that Isaac sees leaping through the forest? Does he really see it? Does that deer bear any thematic relationship to Old Ben?

"The Bear"

"Delta Autumn"

"Delta Autumn" allows Faulkner to test the aging Isaac’s actual racial morality against the high idealism of his youth. How does he do this? Does Isaac pass or fail the test? What do the hunting horn that he gives the young woman, Roth’s lover, and the doe, run over by their automobile, symbolize?

"Go Down, Moses"