Word: mccaslin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Renunciation. In the series of novel las and short stories brought together in Go Down, Moses, Faulkner expressed most explicitly his hope that some day reconciliation may be found in an end to exploitation of one race by another. More than any other Faulkner character, Ike McCaslin grapples with and points the way to the moral and emotional resolution of the white man's guilt. Faulkner begins again at the beginning, where Ike McCaslin's ancestors with their slaves took the land from the Indians and tamed it to cotton. He then tells how Ike himself...
Ostensibly, Ike McCaslin's life is a series of hunting stories. As that, they are fine entertainment, often anthologized. But beyond that the stories make up a mystical, and for Faulkner truly religious, statement of man's holy relation to the wild land. What Ike McCaslin learns is that he can have peace only at the price of renouncing his claim to his father's slave-won, sharecropper-run plantation, "founded upon injustice and erected by ruthless rapacity and carried on even yet with at times downright savagery not only to the human beings but the valuable...