(2 of 3)
The novel opens with the sudden news that Lucas Beauchamp has shot Vinson Gowrie, a backwoodsman. A lynching is expected momentarily. For Charles, this news stirs an emotional crisis. He remembers how, during a childhood hunting expedition, he had fallen into an icy pond and had found shelter in Lucas' cabin. Next to the massive black man, he had felt small and uncertain. To assert his budding sense of superiority, he offered the Negro some coins as payment for a meal, but with a magnificent gesture Lucas had shamed him.
Now, when it seems that the Negro is doomed, Charles is troubled by confused feelings: he hopes Lucas may be saved while subconsciously enjoying the thought that he may burn in gasoline. When Charles, with his Uncle Gavin, visits Lucas in jail, the unperturbed prisoner refuses to tell his story to Gavin, since as a
Negro he trusts no adult whites. But he does consent to offer Charles the tip that Vinson Gowrie was not killed by a bullet from his gun—as an examination of the buried body will show.
The boy is now faced with a sickening problem: dare he dig up a white man's still fresh grave in order to save an irritatingly proud Negro? His Uncle Gavin, though friendly to Lucas, does not believe he is innocent. Certainly no white adult in the whole county believes it, and none would dare risk the ire of the Gowrie clan by disturbing the grave. But Charles, acting on his uncontaminated instinct, goes to the grave at night, taking with him a Negro boy and a 70-year-old white woman. They set off a train of events which prove that Lucas is innocent.
"Now What?" The novel ends with a rousingly comic scene in which Lucas gravely lumbers up to Uncle Gavin's office to pay for his legal services. When Gavin as gravely tells him that the fee will be two dollars, Lucas extracts from an ancient purse a dollar bill, some silver, and 50 pennies. He then stands waiting. "Now what?" asks the lawyer. "My receipt," says Lucas.
Never before has Faulkner been so explicit in presenting a solution to Southern problems. "I only say that the injustice is ours, the South's. We must expiate it and abolish it ourselves, alone and without help . . ."
Whatever its worth as social analysis, as a novel, Intruder in the Dust is surely one of the best written by a 20th Century American. It is composed in Faulkner's usual polyphonic rhetoric: long sentences, spiraling over pages and interspersed with complex parentheses, matted coils of language that suggest the quality of disturbed reverie. In the hands of almost any other writer, this sort of swampy, tangled eloquence would be unbearable, but occasion, ally Faulkner's rhetoric is driven by the whip of this tremendous and urgent passion. Sample (an apostrophe to the Negro):