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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 as a boy grows up in the town of Jefferson, learns to hunt deer and bear, and is initiated into a manly love for the wilderness and all the creatures in it.
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 animals too." But after this his wife rejects him, and Ike thereby loses the right to found a family of his own. The price of reconciliation is terribly high, Faulkner says—and even then it may not be enough.
Told by an Idiot. In The Sound and the Fury, which many critics call his greatest book, Faulkner examined the aimlessness, moral impotence and sense of doom that he saw afflicting many of the old established Southern families in the first third of this century. The events are simple enough, though the stream-of-consciousness telling makes them often difficult to follow. Of the four children in the aristocratic Compson family, the boy Benjy is an idiot, the girl Caddy gets pregnant, marries the wrong man, and goes away, the boy Quentin commits suicide in an inflexible rejection of his sister's dishonor, and the boy Jason grows into a man constantly lashing himself with hate, frustration and repressed violence.
Only the old Negro servant of the family, Dilsey Gibson, can be seen as whole and fully human. Some have found Dilsey heroically simple to the point of sentimental caricature of the "black mammy." Faulkner clearly intended her as a celebration of the quality of Negro endurance that survives with dignity in the Deep South. She is also the book's moral norm, against which the reader measures the decline of the Compsons into drunkenness, hypochondria, idiocy, promiscuity and suicide. Through the three decades spanned by the novel, Dilsey Gibson, with her strength, patience and honesty, is the only one who keeps the family together at all.