Go Down Moses

18 Pages 4429 Words

Political Thought in Literature Some key points to consider in Faulkner's Go Down, Moses: The book's title: Comes from an old Negro spiritual, "Go Down, Moses, 'way down in Egypt land; Tell Pharaoh … let my people go!" (Part of it is sung in the title story, last chapter of the book). Why did Faulkner choose this story? (The spiritual of course is comparing the enslavement of blacks in America to that which the Jews endured in Egypt. Each chapter in the book explores some aspect of the legacy of slavery for the South - and for America as a whole, perhaps?). "Was": Set off from the rest of the book: not numbered as a chapter. Takes place in 1859. "Was" because (1) it depicts events that took place before the birth of any character who appears in the remaining chapters; (2) it's the only chapter depicting events prior to the Civil War and emancipation; i.e., it takes place while slavery still exists; (3) it's mediated BOTH by the memory of Cass, a boy through whose only partly comprehending eyes we witness the events it depicts, AND by that of Ike, to whom Cass told it. Nature of the McCaslin household: Buck/Buddy are bachelor twins, live like boys who never grew up (fox/ hounds chase around the house, only one necktie between them). As we learn in "The Bear": as soon as their father died, they freed the slaves at least in title (couldn't literally have freed slaves in the Deep South by that time), moved them into the big house, themselves moving into a cabin they built for themselves on the plantation; "sealing" the slaves into the big house with a single nail each evening, actually allowing them to roam free (250-51). Evidently Buck - who married Sophonsiba and became Ike's father after the Civil War - was unwilling to marry/ pass on any legacy so long as the institution of slavery remained. The "hunt" for Tomey's Turl a comical imitation of a slave hunt. The whole event only dimly ...