Introduction
In 1942, William Faulkner brought an end to the peak of his writing career when he published the short story cycle Go Down, Moses. His peak began thirteen years earlier in 1928 when he began writing The Sound and the Fury, the novel which earned him a place among the top writers of the time. Renowned Faulkner critic André Bleikasten would go on to claim that “nineteen twenty-eight marks the start of the most prolific and inventive period of [Faulkner’s] career.” Between the publication of these two works, he penned numerous other novels, short stories, and screenplays, marking himself as a prolific writer and a staple of mid-20th century literature. Among all these other works, what makes Go Down, Moses and The Sound and the Fury stand out? They are, of course, the bookends to over a decade of stellar writing, but they are even more so two ends of a thematic web woven by Faulkner.
The first of the two works to be written, The Sound and the Fury, is a departure from the early attempts at novels by Faulkner. It is told non-linearly, with the past and the present wrapping themselves together throughout. As Cleanth Brooks writes in First Encounters, “the reader may well believe that Faulkner is ordering his sequences in the worst possible way.” This reader would unfortunately be missing the broader picture that Faulkner is trying to convey; that picture being the conflict the characters experience between the present they are living in and the view of the past they have developed. His characters in this novel live in a twisting and trying mental state that imposes a constant tension between what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen.
Faulkner’s later work, Go Down Moses, does much of the same in terms of structure. In fact, there is a natural apprehension to even call the text a novel. Most often, it is referred to as either a short story cycle or a composite novel, alluding to the fact that the text seems to be composed of various different but interrelated short stories. According to Michelle Pacht, however, “in interviews, Faulkner insisted on calling the book a novel,” which she writes is “a fact that points to the text’s unity.” Seeing that the text is clearly unified to a large degree and that Faulkner himself referred to it as a novel, it will be referred to in this essay as such, for the sake of simplicity. Understanding that it is a novel is almost tangential to the main point, though. Most importantly, Go Down, Moses plays with the concept of the non-linear passage of time similarly to The Sound and the Fury. To the characters and the reader, time is not a line on which to place events neatly. Rather, it is a ball, with past, present, and future all rolled up together, each always impacting the others in some way. It is in this structure that the characters of Go Down, Moses find themselves, the tension of all events that have happened or will happen creating the conflict that each character is burdened with.
After recognizing that such a conflict exists, it is imperative to understand the three ways that characters can approach their situation in the conflict of past and present. The first group of characters can be identified as the nihilists. The nihilists have a negative view of both the past and the present. Cleanth Brooks’ definition of nihilism is “the discovery that life has no meaning.” These characters ascribe to the idea that nothing was ever actually good and nothing will ever be good. Defining traits of these characters are often greed, pride, and drunkenness, along with the intellectual rationalization of these traits. In embracing such traits as well as the negative worldview, these characters are happy to let the world around them fall into ruin and disarray. Negligence of this caliber is to be expected from a group so set on apathy toward the wellbeing of their world.
Second, there are the idealists; the idealists are characters who long for an idealized past. Joseph Blotner uses the following definition of idealism when writing about Faulkner in his essay “Continuity and Change”: “behavior or thought based on a conception of things as they should be or as one would wish them to be.” The characters’ view of history is distorted and does not quite fit into the real understanding of past events. These characters desire to make their present and future look more like an idealization of the past that they have never experienced, and it destroys their lives, leaving them with little or no hope for the future. Another way that idealism shows through the characters is in the search for purity. They often wish to purify their world in favor of the idealized view they have imagined.
The final collection of characters is the realists. A realist is described as one who accepts both the past and the present as they come, and does not get lost in grand views of the past, whether they be positive or negative. Rather, the realist is typically able to distinguish the good from the bad, and lacks any obsessive or compulsive tendencies. Of course, no person is perfect, and neither are the characters in Faulkner’s works. The realist desires to provide hope and stability amid the turmoil caused by the tension between the idealists and the nihilists. In this way, the realists not only calm the conflict of past and present, but they also calm the conflicts that arise from being overcome with grand views of the past and the present.
In both The Sound and the Fury and Go Down, Moses, the three groups identified as idealists, nihilists, and realists are present. The idealists and nihilists are a source of much of the conflict in each novel, which is attempted to be resolved by the realists. Through these attempts, the realists establish themselves as the heroes of the novels, and they provide the audience with a hope for the future.
The Nihilist
Jason III and the Clicking of Time
Jason Compson III is never really introduced in The Sound and the Fury. He is just always there, in the same way that a child is never introduced to his father. Even in Faulkner’s appendix to the novel, he is not introduced, but instead he is talked about as if the reader already knows him. Faulkner writes, “Jason III … sat all day long with a decanter of whiskey and a litter of dogeared Horaces and Livys and Catalines, composing … caustic and satiric eulogies on both his dead and his living fellowtownsmen.” As apt a description as can be found of Jason III in the entire novel, it portrays him surrounded by two things: liquor and death. He has no cares in life and no desires other than pleasure and the eventual end to his existence, as he believes, which will come through death. It is this nihilistic view of life that infects his son Quentin in the second section of the novel.
The reader first hears Quentin recount his father’s many words and teachings to him early on in his monologue. His most notable first memory is of his father talking about time and watches. He remembers Jason III saying “Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels.” To a Christian this sounds like pure blasphemy — and maybe it is.
Looking deeper, however, the reader can see that Jason III has taken a heroic figure, the crucified Christ who died for others’ sins, and turned him into a weak man who was brought down by the steady onslaught of time. There is perhaps no better way to exemplify Jason III’s nihilistic tendencies than to show his view that an act of sacrifice for others is meaningless against the passing of time. He has no hope for the future. In fact, he seems to have disdain for the future. He just wants time to stop, as he tells Quentin about his gift watch, “I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment.” Jason III’s negativity about the future and his resentment toward time’s continual passing not only leads him to drown himself in alcohol, but it also infects Quentin’s mind and causes him to go down his own path toward stopping the future from coming.
Furthering the idea of Jason III’s generally negative outlook toward all things, he gives additional advice to Quentin, saying “a man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you’d think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune.” The only way for Jason III to see the world is through a negative lens. Because he cannot see himself as being affected in any way by his fortunes, he is consumed by his misfortunes. As Cleanth Brooks writes of Jason III, “he is now a beaten man, worn down, and all too ready to take refuge in his decanter of bourbon.” Like so many of the characters that have already been addressed, Jason III is looking to escape his present moment. He cannot endure it on his own or look toward the future hopefully. Instead, time continues on and all he can do is hope to retreat from it until he is no longer beholden to it. Brooks, although pointing out the broken state of Jason III, attempts to defend his philosophy to some extent. “What Mr. Compson believes,” writes Brooks, “and what he has tried to instill in Quentin is a version of stoicism.” The unfortunate reality is that Jason III’s desire to remain unaffected by things outside of his control leads him to become careless about things within his control. His carelessness and drunkenness lead to familial disarray at his hands. By seemingly giving up on his duties as a father, he plants the nihilistic seeds in the mind of Quentin, which will inevitably lead him toward suicide. Jason III strips away the hope of those around him, including the reader, due to his nihilism. He unquestionably has an effect on his children and their perspectives.
The Idealist
Sam Fathers and the Old People
Sam Fathers is introduced in the story titled “The Old People.” He is depicted as hunting with a young Uncle Ike, “standing just behind the boy as he had been standing when the boy shot his first running rabbit with his first gun.” It is clear from this introduction that not only is Sam a mentor to young Uncle Ike, but he is also a dedicated sportsman and a man who is comfortable in the wilderness. Not apparent from this brief introduction, however, is that Sam is the son of the Chickasaw king Ikkemotubbe. As stated earlier, Ikkemotubbe has a son with a quadroon woman whom he promptly marries off to another man and sells into slavery. This son is Sam Fathers, his name being an English form “which in Chickasaw had been Had-Two-Fathers” because of his conflicted paternal relationships.
On the same page, there is a description of Sam as a sixty-year-old man, somewhat short and chubby-looking, with long dark hair, “whose only visible trace of negro blood was a slight dullness of the hair and the fingernails, and something else which you did notice about the eyes, which you noticed because it was not always there.” But what is it that one might notice about the eyes? Uncle Ike’s cousin and father figure, Cass Edmonds, seems to have an understanding about this:
the boy’s cousin McCaslin told him what that was: not the heritage of Ham, not the mark of servitude but of bondage; the knowledge that for a while that part of his blood had been the blood of slaves. “Like an old lion or a bear in a cage,” McCaslin said. “He was born in the cage and had been in it all his life; he knows nothing else. Then he smells something. It might be anything, any breeze blowing past anything and then into his nostrils … But that’s not what he smells then. It was the cage he smelled. He hadn’t smelled the cage until that minute. Then the hot sand or the brake blew into his nostrils and blew away, and all he could smell was the cage. That’s what makes his eyes look like that.
Sam is haunted by the slavery that he has endured, even if it was not for a long time and had not made up a substantial portion of his heritage; it still haunts him. He cannot overcome the fact that he, the son of a king, was a slave for a time. In his mind, he is not meant for such a lowly position, but for the world that should have been reserved for him. He should be king. The caged bear or lion imagery perfectly encapsulates Sam as a man. Were he to live in the idealized past of the Chickasaw — ignoring that they, too, had enslaved people — he would be a force of nature with power above most men. However, he is in a cage: at first the literal bonds of slavery, but now the mental bonds of idealism. The past haunts him, and instead of trying to make the best of the world he lives in, he tries to resurrect a past before the fall of the Chickasaw and the shackles of servitude, a past which likely was never a reality.
In trying to resurrect this idealized Chickasaw Eden, Sam has gotten himself caught up so much in the past that he has forgotten the present. To this point, Faulkner describes Sam as a man “whose grandfathers had owned the land long before the white men ever saw it and who had vanished from it now, … what of blood they left behind them running in another race and for a while even in bondage and now drawing toward the end of its alien and irrevocable course, barren, since [he] had no children.” Sam is childless and will never have children. His focus is centered on the past, recouping the past, resurrecting the past, idealizing the past. A past-centered life cannot leave room for any focus on the future, which would be required if he were to have progeny of his own. The lack of fertility or passing down of blood is representative of a lack of hope in the future. He despairs over the loss of the paradise that Mississippi once was, and he sees no way forward and nothing on the horizon but total desolation. For this reason he lives as a bachelor and tries to avoid his reality. In the words of Cass Edmonds, Sam is “his own battleground, the scene of his own vanquishment and the mausoleum of his defeat.” The despair and desolation he feels is evident in his very self. He himself is a place of death, a graveyard, a body-strewn battlefield. Everything about him revolves around the loss of his place as king, and the loss of the people and place he spent his entire life idealizing.
Sam believes that the wilderness is a part of him, just as he is a part of the wilderness, and this is how his story concludes. While hunting in “The Old People,” Sam and Uncle Ike come across a massive buck, and Sam raises his hand to it, saying, “Oleh, Chief … Grandfather.” He greets the buck as if it were a relation to him because he sees it as so. His attitude toward the buck and the way he addresses it shows that he has a reverence for and connection with a culture he has never known, one which possibly never existed in the way he imagines. Then later on, in “The Bear,” a group of men go hunting a bear named Old Ben, which results in the death of the bear, a hunting dog, and Sam Fathers. Both Old Ben and Sam, representing nature and the idyllic world the Chickasaw once inhabited, pass away leaving no trace behind them. Hope is again struck out, as the ideal past can never be realized, especially now that two of the last figures of the past are gone.
The Realist
Dilsey and the Church
Dilsey, like the other realists, never gets her own section in The Sound and the Fury, nor does she even get to display her inner thoughts on the page. Her existence in the novel is only through the perspective of other characters. However, the final section of the novel is told from the third person perspective and features her largely, which allows the reader slightly more insight into her life than can be said for Cass and Caddy. As a servant and cook for the Compson family, Dilsey is societally in a lower strata than them. Regardless of her station, she is in many ways the moral leader of the family.
The last section of The Sound and the Fury features a scene in which Dilsey and her family, the family responsible for serving the Compsons, attend an Easter Sunday service at their church. A visiting preacher has come from St. Louis and it has caused excitement among the congregation. The Gibsons bring Benjy to the service to keep him out of the house and away from Mrs. Compson and Jason IV, who are both irritated with him for crying and yelling. Being the only white attendee and a severely disabled man, he attracts attention. In bringing Benjy to church, she not only shows a level of care for him that his own family does not show, but she is also taking up her responsibilities like Cass and Caddy. It is her role to care for Benjy when he needs it, and she carries out this role without complaints. She cares for him and brings him to church which is in itself a way of preparing and hoping for the future. Looking to Christ for eternal salvation and reprieve from tribulations in the next life is an inherent form of hope. Therefore, it is evident that Dilsey hopes for a better future through Jesus Christ, causing her to faithfully carry out her responsibilities, which in turn causes the reader to see her as a symbol of hope.
Dilsey being in some ways the face of the future is addressed by Cowley in another editor’s note. Referring to a selection from The Sound and the Fury, he writes, “after the Compson family has gone to pieces, … it is Dilsey the cook who is left behind to mourn.” Not only is she left behind to mourn, but she is also left behind to pick up the pieces of the family. Their rampant idealism and nihilism destroys the Compsons, and only a realist such as Dilsey could remain to take what is left toward the future. She could not keep the family from destroying itself, yet she is there to provide stability in the wake of their collapse.
Hagopian attempts to paint Dilsey as a failed character, having lost her battle against the nihilism of Jason III. He writes, “it is therefore Mr. Compson, and not Dilsey, whose values finally prevail.” He is incorrectly asserting that because numerous characters fall victim to the nihilism perpetrated by the Compsons, it is this nihilism that becomes the central philosophy of the novel. Clearly his argument is false, in part because Dilsey is an obvious heroine who outlasts her adversaries and remains a strong character into the future, but also because of
Faulkner’s own words on the subject.
Faulkner’s appendix to The Sound and the Fury is perhaps the best example of Dilsey being a character that successfully symbolizes hope, which he himself recognizes as her creator and lifegiver. Of Dilsey, he writes, “they endured.” Other characters have long descriptions and stories about their lives to provide context and further add to the mythos of Yoknapatawpha County and its inhabitants. Dilsey does not. Her description is a mere two words, one of which is a pronoun that does not grammatically match her. Thus, it can be understood that she, of course, is a hopeful character who symbolizes the need to continue through, to endure, life’s struggles, but even more so she is one of many people who have chosen to do this rather than give up as do the idealists and nihilists. She is not just one hopeful character. She is the representation of all people who choose to hope and pursue a better future instead of giving in to the trials of life.
Conclusion
Faulkner constructed multiple groups of characters that can be seen in both The Sound and the Fury and Go Down, Moses. His nihilists are greedy and apathetic. His idealists are misguided and puritanical. His realists are dignified and hopeful. The nihilists and the idealists create many of the conflicts and problems in the novels, which are then left to the realists to resolve and restore to order. In doing so, the realists not only provide hope for the other characters in the novel, but they also do so for the readers.
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Faulkner teaches you how to speak his language and to think the way he thinks…if you will let him.