Go Down, Mosesの主題と構造

The Theme and Structure of Go Down, Moses

Tanaka Hisao

広島大学文学部紀要

The Hiroshima University studies, Faculty of Letters

Thematically as well as structurally, the seven stories composing Go Down, Moses (1942) are more closely connected with each other as a whole than the stories of the loose form of Winesburg, Ohio, a similar kind of fiction to Faulkner's. This work signifies a turning point in his literary career in that it foreshadows a new type of black character coming to the front in his novels: Lucas Beauchamp, a prominent black figure in Intruder in the Dust (1948), is created here as a proud man who does not act as a mere Sambo as the people of the community expect him to act. His creation, interestingly enough, coincides with the appearance of Ike McCaslin, a new successor to the role of Horace Benbow and Quentin Compson. This paper is an attempt to explore the various aspects of the "relationship between white and negro races" manifested in the story of the McCaslin family, paying special attention to Lucas and Ike, so-called social freaks, who would not obey the customs and values of the traditional patriarchal society.

More than simply a comic story, "Was" is intended to convey Faulkner's idea that the past is not "was" but "is": the sin of the incest of old McCaslin, the founder of the clan, is to be repeated one hundred years later in the miscegenation of Roth Edmonds and his mistress, the repetition which reveals a vicious circle enclosing the doomed society and clan. "The Fire and the Hearth" shows Lucas as a different type of black, but his absence in the rest of the novel suggests a darkness still confronting the black race in Southern society. "Pantaloon in Black" is firmly connected to the whole work by Rider's tragedy, which emphasizes the stereotyped image of a clown Southerners at large tend to hold about blacks. Ike's trilogy— "The Old People," "The Bear," and "Delta Autumn"— presents the spiritual and cultural function of the wilderness and its disappearance, which is symbolic of the decline of the old order of Southern aristocratic society. "Go Down, Moses" is the beginning of the author's reuse of Gavin Stevens, "the best type of liberal Southerners," in his later works. His presence at the end of the novel might suggest a light for the relationship between white and black, and also a bridge between his generation and the next one, Chick Mallison's, because neither Lucas nor Ike can be expexced to come down as a modern Moses.

English and American literature [ 930 ]

jpn

広島大学文学部

[ISSN] 0437-5564

[NCID] AN00213701