Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner is an entertaining, if somewhat confusing story, about events surrounding the McCaslin plantation through the years 1859 and 1941. While the stories are independent in time, the characters and memories overlap and touchstone moments and locations in the family history are frequently referred to. As a result, the stories resonate and overlap like the ripples from seven stones thrown into a pool each reaching out and changing the other – intermingling until they cannot be untangled.
The Humor in Faulkner
While, Faulkner’s writing is not of a style that is typically considered humorous, the episode titled The Fire and The Hearth is bitingly witty. In it we meet, Lucas Beauchamp a black tenant farmer who keeps a still on the McCaslin plantation; home of his landowner and close relation Carothers "Roth" Edmonds. Readers are introduced to Lucas at the beginning of the story, when the reader observes Lucas angrily moving his still in order to hide it because his daughter’s boyfriend, George Wilkins, has begun another illegal still. He thinks that he will end the relationship between his daughter and Wilkins by pointing the authorities in the direction Wilkins’ still. However, he returns from hiding his still to find that his daughter and Wilkins have hid their still and alcohol at his house.
The Fire and The Hearth continues in this vein and while it exposes a great deal of truth about race relations in the South during that era, it also provides the reader with satisfying wit and humor.
The Poignant Side of Faulkner
Another episode included in Go Down, Moses is titled, Pantaloon in Black. In this episode the reader meets, the powerful Rider who works at the sawmill. Handsome and huge, Rider never lacks for women and he enjoys his prowess to the fullest. However, when he falls in love with and marries Mannie, he gives it up and devotes himself completely to his wife. The story opens with Mannie’s funeral and ripples out from the moment of her burial, into the madness of Rider’s grief. The waves sweep past Rider and merge with the viewpoint of a white deputy who doesn’t understand, and are lost in the response of the deputy’s wife who is ready to escape the drama of real life by going to a picture show.
Faulkner is Confusing
While Go Down, Moses has enjoyable and relatively easy stories to understand, it would not be a true work of Faulkner if it didn’t present the reader with moments of complete confusion. In the first episode of novel, Was, we are provided with a disjointed sketch of the haphazard life and times of the infamous twin sons of Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, the patriarch of the McCaslin clan about whom all the stories in Go Down, Moses relate to.
The twins, who are most often referred to as "Uncle Buck" and "Uncle Buddy”, are eccentric brothers who live together in a cabin along with a fox and hound. The story revolves around their hunt for the missing slave, Tomey’s Turl, whose destination, the twins already know.
Like The Fire and The Hearth, this section has biting humor. However, the narrative voice is that of ‘Ike’ McCaslin who didn’t actually experience the events but heard them from his older cousin ‘Cass’ Edmonds who was a young child at the time and who didn’t really understand what was going on or why it was happening. As a result, the humor and the narrative thread in Was is often lost through the intervention of two unreliable narrators.
A Good Introduction to Faulkner
Because the seven stories, in Go Down, Moses can stand-alone, it is a good book for first time readers of Faulkner. While not as famous as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying or Absalom, Absalom, it is a novel that is more accessible to readers who are more interested in story than complicated themes.
Complicated themes exist in the novel; however, the reader is not required to wrestle with them in order to appreciate the humor and poignancy of most of the stories in the novel.
Faulkner, William. Go Down, Moses. Vintage International. 1990. 0-679-73217-9
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