Character Analysis
Isaac McCaslin is the main character in this book—his history runs through many of the chapters and ties the stories together. From the perspective of the people around him, Isaac is a strange, strange man. The choices he's made in life baffle everyone from his older cousin McCaslin Edmonds to his wife to Lucas Beauchamp. They just don't get him.
What are these unconventional choices? Well, Isaac's the rightful inheritor of family patriarch Carothers McCaslin's plantation, but when the time comes for him to take over the plantation at age twenty-one, he relinquishes it to his cousin McCaslin, goes to live in a badly built bungalow in the town for the rest of his life and survives on monthly pay-outs from his relatives. He marries, but doesn't have children. He's also a very skilled hunter, and keeps hunting and camping at a very old age when most men his age are long dead. Plus, he's a philosopher of sorts, an idealist, with lots of thoughts about man's place in the world and his responsibilities toward the earth and humankind.
So what makes our strange hero tick?
To Hold The Earth Mutual
Let's start with Isaac's most important decision in life, relinquishing his right to the McCaslin plantation that is his to inherit as the descendant on the white male line of McCaslins. In a long and rambling discussion about this with his older cousin McCaslin, Isaac confesses that what he is doing is "something which I have got to do which I dont quite understand myself" (5.4.146), and then adds,
I could say I dont know why I must do it but that I do know I have got to because I have got myself to have to live with for the rest of my life and all I want is peace to do it in. (5.4.146)
Why couldn't he live with himself if he took his inheritance? Well, he believes that God created humans to be:
overseer on earth and to hold suzerainty over the earth and the animals on it in His name, not to hold for himself and his descendants inviolable title forever, generation after generation, to the oblongs and squares of the earth, but to hold the earth mutual and intact in the communal anonymity of brotherhood. (5.4.7)
In other words, he believes that no one person or family can claim ownership of the land.
The Whole South Is Cursed
Another reason Isaac doesn't want to own the land is because the idea of ownership of the land led to a system of ownership of humans—that is, to slavery—because in order to cultivate the wilderness, people needed slaves.
As a teenager, he learns the sordid story of his own family's slaves from reading the plantation's ledgers. His grandfather Carothers McCaslin is the person who bought all of their slaves. If being a slave owner wasn't bad enough, he had a daughter, Tomey, with one of his slaves, and then an illegitimate son, Turl, with his own daughter Tomey. He refused to acknowledge any of this, but left some money to be given to them after his death.
Needless to say, that's a horrible family legacy to be burdened with. After old Carothers' death, his sons—Isaac's father and uncle—start a manumission scheme (2.3.1.29) and free most of their slaves before Abolition. In Isaac's mind, that was a good start, but still really insufficient.
Isaac believes that slavery has cursed the land in the South, including his family's plantation. When talking to Fonsiba's new husband, he says:
"Don't you see? This whole land, the whole South, is cursed, and all of us who derive from it, whom it even suckled, white and black both, lie under the curse?" (5.4.113)
In an almost mystical way, Isaac sees a connection between the destruction of the land and the evil of slavery. As an old man, Isaac reflects on the choices he's made, and realizes how Sam Fathers, the part-Chickasaw and part-African American mentor who taught him how to hunt and respect the spirit of the wilderness, played a big part in the decision. When Sam marked Isaac with the blood of the first buck Isaac killed, he marked Isaac for:
that day and [Isaac] and McCaslin juxtaposed not against the wilderness but against the tamed land, the old wrong and shame itself, in repudiation and denial at least of the land and the wrong and shame even if he couldn't cure the wrong and eradicate the shame, who at fourteen when he learned of it had believed he could do both when he became competent and when at twenty-one he became competent he knew that he could do neither but at least he could repudiate the wrong and shame [...]. (6.63)
Which is to say, Isaac realizes he couldn't do anything to eradicate the curse of slavery, but by giving up his ownership of the plantation, he could at least repudiate any benefit he might have gained from it:
[S]uddenly [Isaac] knew why he had never wanted to own any of [the land], arrest at least that much of what people called progress, measure his longevity at least against that much of its ultimate fate. It was because there was just exactly enough of it. He seemed to see the two of them--himself and the wilderness--as coevals[...]. (6.66)
So he also couldn't do anything to stop the march of progress, but again, by refusing to farm the land, he was refusing to participate in its destruction.
A futile decision? Well, maybe. Painful? Yes, considering his wife refuses to have sex with him ever again because of his decision (5.4.199), and other people never, ever understand him. But Isaac makes life choices he believes in.
The Mystic
What's so bad about progress? It's progress. Good question. Well, remember that the wilderness was a hugely important part of Isaac's life:
If Sam Fathers has been his mentor and the backyard rabbits and squirrels his kindergarten, then the wilderness the old bear ran was his college and the old male bear itself, so long unwifed and childless as to have become its own ungendered progenitor, was his alma mater. (5.2.2)
Since the day he shoots his first buck and Sam anoints him with the buck's blood, Isaac's been indelibly marked by the wilderness, and vows to hunt "honorably." He's spiritually connected to the wilderness, and all of his values in life come from his self-image as a man in nature. He believes that when he dies, he'll end up in "a dimension free of both time and space," where he'll see:
the faces of the old men he had known and loved and for a little while outlives, moving again among the shades of tall unaxed trees and sightless brakes where the wild strong immortal game ran forever before the tireless belling immortal hounds, falling and rising phoenix-like to the soundless guns. (6.66)
Isaac believes that everything in the universe is part of one unified whole and that nothing ever dies—it just changes form. You can see why that might not go over so well with most of the more traditional people who know him.
The Radical?
In some ways, Isaac's way ahead of his time when it comes to ideas about race. In his discussion with McCaslin Edmonds about relinquishing his inheritance, he argues that the black race will outlast the white Southern farmers because of their superior strength, endurance and love of family. Old Carothers's exploitation of his slaves, particularly his female slaves, horrifies Isaac. That one race could be considered sub-human, the property of another race, is something he totally rejects.
[…] the last save himself of old Carothers' doomed and fatal blood which in the male derivation seemed to destroy all it touched […] (5.4.146)
When Isaac visits Fonsiba, her husband insists the curse of the land has been lifted after the war.
"We are seeing a new era, an era dedicated […] to freedom, liberty, and equality for all […]"
"Freedom from what? From work? (5.4.113-114)
There's a hint here of an old stereotype—that blacks after liberation were lazy, that they couldn't handle freedom. Isaac can't quite escape the stereotypes:
[…] those upon whom freedom and equality had been dumped overnight and without warning or preparation or any training in how to employ it or even just endure it and who misused it […] Apparently there is a wisdom beyond even that learned through suffering necessary for a man to distinguish between liberty and license […]. (5.4.146)
At the end of his life, Isaac discovers that Roth has fathered a child with a part-black woman. He meets her but doesn't know at first that she's black because she's very light-skinned. When he finally realizes it, and understands what's happened, he thinks:
Maybe in a thousand or two years in America, he thought. But not now! Not now! (6.92)
Isaac, for all his progressive thinking, doesn't feel the country is ready for the mixing of the races. He tells the woman to go home a marry a black man. He understands that eventually, all races will become one, but he can't accept that in his lifetime.
Timeline