Go Down, Moses

William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses has a mind-blowing centerpiece in "The Bear", however the rest of the short stories fall short of this standard. "The Bear" ranks with the top of Faulkner's writing (As I Lay Dying and The Sound And The Fury) but the other stories show that this was an author who

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more or less got lucky rather than set out to distinctly create nothing but masterpieces. This is okay- after all, it worked for Shakespeare, but even he wrote a "Merry Wives Of Windsor", even he wrote "The Two Gentlemen of Verona."

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Faulkner não considerava Go Down, Moses como antologia de contos, mas como um romance em episódios sobre a relação do homem com a natureza. Isaac McCaslin é um dos personagens mais interessantes do autor.
This delta, he thought: This Delta. This land which man has deswamped and denuded and

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derivered in two generations so that white men can own plantations and commute every night to Memphis and black men own plantations and ride in jim crow cars to Chicago to live in millionaires’ mansions on Lakeshore Drive, where white men rent farms and live like n*gg*rs and n*gg*rs crop on shares and live like animals, where cotton is planted and grows man-tall in the very cracks of the sidewalks, and ursury and mortgage and bankcruptcy and measureless wealth, Chinese and African and Aryan and Jew, all breed and spawn together until no man has time to say which is which nor cares…. No wonder the ruined woods I used to know don’t cry for retribution! He thought: The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge.

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Some beautiful and truly touching stories, and certainly some of Faulkner's best. Oddly enough, The Bear, which is often mentioned as Faulkner's best story, fell dead and completely flat after Ike's beautifully described encounter with Old Ben and the monstrous dog Lion, when the story becomes a

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tedious (and probably academically interesting) chronical of the family's next few decades, which moves more or less like notations in a wage book. This is historically intriguing, since apparently the ledger was copied almost word for word from an actually post-Civil War document. Still, THE BEAR is probably the biggest let down I've ever read, since the first 20 pages are among the best I've read anywhere. Thematically, the story's conclusion makes sense, since it deals with greed, land, bloodlines and family, but it just did not have the narrative thrust of the earlier sections.

Faulkner at his best makes you feel and understand and entire world, working in the background. His greatest stories grab you by the throat and never let go.

Faulkner at his worst becomes a sort of confusing historical chronicler, devoid of emotion or even tangible scenes.

Still,The Fire and the Hearth is brilliant (10/10), Pantaloon in Black is a truly weirdo depiction of mythbuilding and racial oppression (9/10), and the other pieces are all great in their own ways (WAS is a hilarious and disturbing story of race, love and a poker game).

Greatly recommended.

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A novel in 7 parts covering several generations of the McCaslin family and set in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha county--in rural Mississippi. Faulkner as usual juxtaposes the relations between black and white over those several generations--as the McCaslin family has members on both sides of

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the color line. In some ways reminiscent of some works of Zola--one can also see why comparisons are made to more contemporary writers such as Claude Simon or Cormac McCarthy. Very well written--the plot though can veer in and out of sensibility--almost being as dense in some parts as the forest Ike McCaslin hunts in its most famous chapter 'The Bear'. Faulkner's style was certainly extraordinary for his time with its non-linear plot lines often told in a backwoods vernacular delving into and fleshing out the psychologies of its characters and the times and mores in which they live. Overall a very good book IMO. I had not read anything of his in years but I am thinking that maybe I will be reading something else of his in the near future.

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I just love Faulkner's writing - the Deep South he describes just seems to come to life before my eyes. This set of connected short stories make up the history of two entwined families -- the white family of McCaslin/Edmonds and the Negro family of Beauchamp -- ranging from the pre-Civil War times

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to the 1940s. The heart of the book is the novella "The Bear," which I had read years ago. I think that it was enhanced by having the surrounding stories and would recommend this over reading it as a stand-alone.

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This was a fascinating and frustrating book. The writing was beautiful, the description was lyrical, and the psychological insight was spot on. Faulkner captures a time and place like no other writer. What was frustrating was trying to keep track of all the relationships. The core characters were

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the black and white descendants of a plantation owner going through 4 or 5 generations. The stories jump back and forth in time, weaving the fates of these characters and making offhand references to the past as if the reader knew and understood all the relationships for all the times. I almost made a genealogy chart, but gave up and just tried to enjoy the stories for themselves. A fascinating insight into our past just before and after the Civil War and ending in the early 20th Century.

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A wonderful, complex intertwined set of stories about the McCasslin clan, black and white, over the generations, as the sins of the fathers are certainly carried forward through the history of the antebellum and postwar south. Faulkner's prose requires a good deal of concentration, especially in

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the core story "The Bear", but it is worth the work.

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Go Down, Moses marks the end of William Faulkner's period of greatest creativity. The themes he addresses in this novel built out of interconnected stories connect with and overlap those addressed in other of his works of this period, notably The Hamlet. Throughout the book the presence of time -

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past, present and future - is connected by the blood; the bloodlines of the family.

"to the boy those old times would cease to be old times and would become a part of the boy's present, not only as if they had happened yesterday but as if they were still happening," (p. 165)

The blood of the fathers, their 'curse', becomes one of the themes in the first three stories: Was, The Fire and the Hearth, and Pantaloon in Black.

"Then one day the old curse of his fathers, the old haughty ancestral pride based not on any value but on an accident of geography, stemmed not from courage and honor but from wrong and shame, descended to him." (p. 107)

The relations between the races and the nature of the family are presented here by Faulkner. The hearth suggests connections with the Anglo-Irish culture from which the McCaslins originated. After all the McCaslin's heritage is one of tension and guilt. The initiation of the young into this culture is presented in The Old People when Ike becomes a man, and is repeated in The Bear. There is also the theme of man versus nature through the contrast of the natural man with the social man of civilization. I sensed resonance with a Rousseau-like view of the world in the emphasis on getting away from civilization in The Bear. This can also be read in the tradition of Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Ultimately, we see in Go Down, Moses Faulkner's mythic world of Yoknapatawpha County once more with its people, their land, and their ghosts. How they relate to our world today is up to the reader to decide.

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Tried to read Faulkner several times. I am just not a fan. Currently at 35% and hating it. Maybe I will learn to appreciate him by the end??

It did get better, but I find his style rambling and hard to follow at times. I don't think it helped that a large portion of the book was describing "hunting

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in the woods" which I have zero interest in. Also the book is composed of 7 short stories that are loosely related, so it lacked the continuity of a traditional novel. It will be interesting to see how this compares to his other works.

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I think that this is Faulkner at his absolute best. In my opinion, THE BEAR is the best piece of writing in all of literature. But the rest of the stories are underrated because of the strong presence of that one. Pantaloon in Black is good and Delta Autumn and Was. I love Lucas Beauchamp and his

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metal detector. It is greatly tragic and comedic.

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As a literature student or a reader, I'm not sure how to rate this. It is my first experience with Faulkner (how did I get so far without having read him before).

Overall, a very interesting novel that challenges what a novel IS.

As an example, the central "chapter" - "The Bear" - could be argued to

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be a novella on its own. But the surrounding stories, which build up the narrative of the family and its history, all contribute something to it.

Faulkner does some amazing things with sentence structure, stretching the rules of English syntax to their limits in some of the most astounding ways.

Not sure if this would be the work I'd suggest as someone's "first Faulkner".

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The twists and turns of a large extended family that revolves around one character in one way or another while showing the change of life in Mississippi over the course of 80 years. Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner is a novel constructed around seven interconnected short stories revolving around

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the McCaslin family and relations.

The novel begins with “Was” relating how one night’s search for an escaped slave ultimately leads to the birth of the book’s central character, Isaac “Uncle Ike” McCaslin, and his Beauchamp relations who are descended from McCaslin’s grandfather with a black slave. “The Fire and the Hearth” follows Lucas Beauchamp, a black sharecropper who is farming his McCaslin’s ancestor’s land and getting away with treating the white landowner Roth Edmonds with bare contempt. “Pantaloon in Black” follows Rider who lives on Roth Edmond’s plantation who buries his wife then after seeing her ghost essentially goes suicidal as he kills a white man who’s been cheating blacks at dice for years and gets lynched. “The Old People” follows a ten-year old Isaac McCaslin killing his first deer on his first hunt with help from Sam Feathers, a son of a Chickasaw chief and a black slave-girl, who then leads him to an old tribal ritual to mark him becoming a hunter. “The Bear” follows Isaac over the next several years as he and the hunting group attempt to kill Old Ben, which only succeeds after they get a feral terrier named Lion that brings the bear to bay to allow to kill. Afterwards Isaac goes over his family’s history and decides to sign over his plantation to his cousin McCaslin Edmonds, Roth’s grandfather. “Delta Autumn” sees a nearly 80-year Isaac go on another hunting trip but with the sons and grandsons of the first hunting group seen in “The Old People”, he learns that Roth has had an affair and child with a black woman who turns out to be a distant Beauchamp cousin. The titular “Go Down, Moses” follows Gavin Stevens as he arranges the return and burial of Lucas Beauchamp’s executed grandson at the instigation of Lucas’ wife.

The quality of each story is up and down with “The Old People” read like the best followed by “Was”. Every other story really wasn’t that good, and some were just frustrating, especially “The Bear”. “The Bear” was compelling until the final third when Faulkner changed writing styles as Isaac explores his family history before giving away his land to his cousin while still taking care of his Beauchamp relations. Faulkner’s writing style decisions either made the stories good or frustrating, but I must admit that all of them did have some compelling things.

Go Down, Moses is not considered one of William Faulkner’s best works by many of his fans. While I can’t speak to that, I know I was not a fan of this book. This is many second Faulkner book and both have not been to my liking, I may read another Faulkner book several years in a future but nothing soon.

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This is a good collection of related stories. As with all Faulkner, it helps if you have read other stuff first--but you have to start somewhere! My college Faulkner course included The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, Sanctuary, As I Lay Dying, some short stories, and this book. With a great

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professor, it worked out well.

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This is not my favorite of Faulkner's but Faulkner is my favorite.

A series of Southern short stories by a master. Great work.

Having never read Faulkner, I was pretty happy with this one. I enjoyed each story for itself, as well as how well each story fit in with the whole. The only thing that I would have liked better was if he had "ordered" the stories in chronological order, & not had them skip back & forth in time the

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way they did. Hemingway did this with the Nick Adams stories, but when they were released as a book after his death, the publishers put them in order so that they made sense. I would have loved to have seen that done with this book, as it can throw you when you go from one time period to another, then back again.

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more powerful than ever; the connections between stories are enhanced on the second reading; the sense of narrative and tragedy are heightened by foreknowledge

As in his other books, Faulker makes you work as a reader: skipping around in time from chapter to chapter and making you figure out "when" you are, using pronouns instead of names and making you figure out "who" is being described, and building a complicated web of characters which you must

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diagram on the inside back cover to understand "how" they are related. Is it worth it? Well, sort of. Not in the way that James Joyce is worth it, at least in Ulysses. And probably not in the way that Virginia Woolf is either.

There are shocks and revelations that come out which of course make it interesting, e.g. a man buying a slave, fathering her daughter, then fathering a child by that daugther causing the mother to commit suicide. Faulker as always also provides insight into life in the South, and the mentality of Southerners. Just brace yourself for some work.

Quotes:
On women:
"I gonter tell you something to remember: anytime you wants to git something done, from hoeing out a crop to getting married, just get the womenfolks to working at it. Then all you needs to do is set down and wait. You member that."

On marriage:
"...husband and wife did not need to speak words to one another, not just from the old habit of living together but because in that one long-ago instant at least out of the long and shabby stretch of their human lives, even though they knew at the time it wouldn't and couldn't last, they had touched and become as God when they voluntarily and in advance forgave one another for all that each knew the other could never be."

On life:
"...after all you dont have to continue to bear what you believe is suffering; you can always choose to stop that, put an end to that. And even suffering and grieving is better than nothing; there is only one thing worse than not being alive, and that's shame. But you cant be alive forever, and you always wear out life long before you have exhausted the possibilities of living."

On whites and african-americans:
"...placarded over with advertisements for snuffs and cures for chills and salves and potions manufactured and sold by white men to bleach the pigment and straighten the hair of negroes that they might resemble the very race which for two hundred years had held them in bondage and from which for another hundred years not even a bloody civil war would have set them completely free"

On the South's attitude to the Civil War:
"Who else could have declared a war against a power with ten times the area and a hundred times the men and a thousand times the resources, except men who could believe that all necessary to conduct a successful war was not acumen nor shrewdness nor politics nor diplomacy not money nor even integrity and simple arithmetic but just love of land and courage..."

And:
"...not because they were opposed to freedom as freedom but for the old reasons for which man (not the generals and politicians but man) has always fought and died in wars: to preserve a status quo or to establish a better future one to endure for his children..."

Lastly on Native Americans, boy ain't in the truth:
"...all that remained of that old time were the Indian names on the little towns and usually pertaining to water - Aluschaskuna, Tillatoba, Homochitto, Yazoo."

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I finished Go Down Moses this past weekend, and like The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom, I‘m afraid of heaping too much praise on it since I feel that I have such a proprietary interest in these books by putting so much work in to them in order to reap the reward. I’m not even sure

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where to rank GDM right now. It was one of those books where I just sat there stunned after finishing it, staring off into the woods behind my house waiting for Sam Fathers to show up.

Taking Faulkner’s advice, I read “The Bear” by skipping that long and puzzling section 4 whereby Ike reads the ledger and repudiates the land he is to inherit. Although I did go back and read it, I don’t think it belongs as part of the story anymore than "Pantaloon in Black" needs to be part of the whole collection.

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For the most part, I liked this book. This is a collection of seven interrelated "short" stories. All the stories have themes about race and wilderness. They are all set in his fictitious Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. My favorite story was called "The Bear" and it probably the most famous one

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in this book. My only complaint about this collection is some of the stories seemed more like novella than short stories. However, I liked the wilderness aspect of the book that makes it a great summer/autumn read.

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