Twisted Little Man Named Faulkner

Some artists draw, write, and/or create bizarre things. The fact alone that they are so good lets them get away with being crazy. Faulkner falls into this category. His stories are just as demented as he was. However, there is a good reason behind it. The man was trying to make a point. Like most artists, he had something to protest to the people. What is Faulkner’s protest? His stories are satirizing the hypocrisy of the Old South. He shows the Old South almost in a sick, twisted joke for all readers to behold. But yet, readers to this very day still love his stories. Why? Faulkner crafted Go Down, Moses to fit his protest through the Old South’s settings and situations in the stories.

The story follows around Isaac McCaslin. Each of the stories follows him up to when he is an old man. Each of the stories portrays the Old South in a jokey, negative light. In the first story, Was, the slave, Tomey’s Turl, is constantly running away to see his girlfriend, Tennie. Usually when people hear that slaves are running from the plantation, they think it is for freedom. Not in this story that Faulkner opens the book up with. He plays the whole escaping theme up to a huge comic sketch. The reader has to wonder why Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy just does not go ahead and buy Tennie or just sell Tomey’s Turl to Tennie’s master in order to keep this running gag from occurring. On pages five and six, here is why, “They couldn’t keep him at home by buying Tennie from Mr. Herbert because Uncle Buck and said he and Uncle Buddy had so many n*****s already that they could hardly walk around on their own land for them, and they couldn’t sell Tomey’s Turl because Mr. Hubert said he not only wouldn’t buy Tomey’s Turl, he wouldn’t have that damn white half-McCaslin on his place even as a free gift, not even if Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy were to pay board and keep for him.” That seems pretty heavy. With these words, Faulkner gives the reader a taste of the Old South’s ugliness with slavery. Black when treated like property back in those times. Such inhumane practices needed to be pointed out for the world to see. Faulkner took it upon himself to so. Was is not the only story that shows this, however. The rest of the stories so Southern hypocrisy, not just in slavery, but in the Old South in general.

Post-modernism plays a huge role in Go Down, Moses. One of the themes in post-modernism is, “open explorations of intimacy, including sexuality, expressed in a variety of ways.” The book has its moment of intimate relationships in it. The story, Pantaloon in Black, has that moment from start to finish. Rider, another slave, has lost his wife, Mannie, through death. Because of this, he loses his mind and starts to act out on his grief. That would lead a slave to their death without blinking in those times. The story leads me to think that Rider wanted to join Mannie after she died. How much were they in love? Page 134 paints a love at first sight type of story as shown here, “So there had been only the Saturday and Sunday dice and whiskey that had to be paid for until that day six months when he saw Mannie, whom he had known all his life, for the first time and said to himself: “Ah’m thu wid all dat,” and they married and he rented the cabin from Carothers Edmonds and built a fire on the hearth on their wedding night as the tale told how Uncle Lucas Beauchamp, Edmonds’ oldest tenant, had done on his forty-five years ago and which had burned ever since;” Pretty sweet in those times, right? That is not the only theme in the whole book, however. In this same story and all of the book, the rule, “social and economic position influenced by many factors that might include individual opportunity, initiative, hard work and luck,” heavily applies. The issue of slavery and class is painted throughout the whole story. Even one third of Isaac’s family is half-black because his grandfather slept with the slave, Tomey. Faulkner makes this note in the story, The Bear, with this passage on page 243, “Then he was twenty-one. He could say it, himself and his cousin juxtaposed not against the wilderness but against the tamed land which was to have been his heritage, the land which old Carothers McCaslin his grandfather had bought with white man’s money from the wild men whose grandfathers without guns hunted it, and tamed and ordered or believed he had tamed and ordered it for the reason that the human beings he held in bondage and in the power of life and death had removed the forest from it and in their scratched the surface of it to a depth of perhaps fourteen inches in order to grow something out of it which had not been there before and which could be translated back into money he who believed he had bought it had had to pay to get it and hold it and a reasonable profit too.” This passage shows that belief of postmodern and the Old South’s beliefs in one whole shot.

Faulkner is in a league of twistedness of his own. He is far different from both Poe and Wharton. Poe was more a romantic while Wharton was more modern. All three of them have a certain darkness to them. They do not seem to like to tell nice little stories. Somebody either has to be dead, miserable, or mocked to the reader. Faulkner executes his own corrupt style in Go Down, Moses. First, he does not really paint nature as a force that influences people. The Bear is all about hunting Old Ben, the title creature, down for sport and pride. Romantics had people and nature act in an equally balance with one another. Faulkner has man more dominate than nature in The Bear. Wharton had relationships and love broken in her stories. Faulkner lets the characters, practically, the slaves have stable loves and relationships. Tomey’s Turl and Tennie are a good example of this. Tomey’s Turl keeps running away to see his lady love—no matter the risks. In the end, they get married after so many comic chases of his masters. Another example of a stable relationship is Rider and Mannie in Pantaloon in Black. Rider is so heartbroken that he lost his love that he takes up drinking and goes mad after killing another slave. Most people would frown upon this. The slave was just in grief and did not seem to know how to live on without his wife. That only convinces the reader that he just wanted to join his beloved wife in Heaven. Rider did get his wish when he was hanged in the Negro school. In all of the examples that are shown in argument, Faulkner is a twisted little man who also happens to be brilliant in his own way compared to Poe and Wharton.