Character Clues

Character Analysis

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Faulkner builds complex characters in Go Down, Moses, whose stories span many years, and he shows them evolving with each major life incident. Want to see how he does this? Let's pick one character, Roth Edmonds, and see how Faulkner paints Roth and shows his development into his adult self.

As a seven-year-old child, Roth betrays his foster brother Henry. Henry and Roth have grown up together, eaten together, slept together. But one day Roth decides he'll no longer sleep on a pallet with Henry because Henry's black. This is how Faulkner describes the scene:

"Are you going to sleep up there?" Henry said. "Well, all right. This here pallet sleeps all right to me, but I reckon I just as like to if you wants to," and rose and approached the bed and stood over the white boy, waiting for him to move over and make room until the boy said, harsh and violent though not loud: "No!" Henry didn't move. "You mean you dont want me to sleep in the bed?" Nor did the boy move. He didn't answer, rigid on his back, staring upward. (2.3.1.52-53)

So, yes, there's dialogue in this scene and Roth says "No!" but it's not so much what he says as what he does—he refuses to lie down on the pallet with Henry, or move over and make room in the bed—that makes him look heartless and cruel.

Direct Characterization

That scene between seven-year-old Roth and Henry is interesting, so let's stick with it. Faulkner builds on Roth's action (and words, although he doesn't really speak much) by directly characterizing Roth's words as "harsh and violent" (2.3.1.52-53).

Let's see what kind of an adult the "harsh and violent" Roth makes. In "Delta Autumn," Roth's driving the hunting party over to the forest. When they're about to enter the wilderness, though, he slams on the brakes. Everyone's wondering why he stops. Uncle Isaac looks at Roth's face to see what's up.

It was the youngest face of them all, aquiline, saturnine, a little ruthless, the face of his ancestor too, tempered a little, altered a little, staring somberly through the streaming windshield across which the twin wipers flicked and flicked. "I didn't intend to come back in here this time," he said suddenly and harshly. (6.6)

So, Roth has grown up to be "saturnine, a little ruthless," "somber" and "harsh." The more things change, the more they stay the same, eh?

Thoughts and Opinions

Poor Roth. We'll keep our focus on him. He must have fascinated Faulkner, too, because Faulkner keeps elaborating on his character by giving him cynical opinions about the world.

In "Delta Autumn," he and Isaac are having a discussion about war. Isaac says, "The only fighting anywhere that ever had anything of God's blessing on it has been when men fought to protect does and fawns" (6.19)—that is, women and children. What does Roth say? He says, "Haven't you discovered in—how many years more than seventy is it?—that women and children are one thing there's never any scarcity of?" (6.20). Wow, what a charmer! He thinks women and children are pretty much expendable. Who cares about them?

Speech and Dialogue

Isaac is Roth's elderly cousin and bequeathed all of his land to Roth's family, but Roth still insults the old man's age and judgment.

"So you've lived almost eighty years, and that's what you finally learned about the other animals you lived among. I suppose the question to ask you is, where have you been all the time you were dead?" (6.37).

Faulkner builds Roth from childhood as this incredibly harsh and cruel character, so when Roth does something like kick nineteen-year-old Samuel Beauchamp out on the street or refuse to meet the mother of his son face-to-face, we think, "Oh, that's so Roth."

Dialect is another aspect of dialogue that Faulkner uses as a tool of characterization. Rider and his family have the most exaggerated black dialect:

"Efn He God, I don't needs to tole Him. Efn He God, he awready know hit. Awright. Hyar Ah is. Leff Him come down hyar and do me some good."(3.1.45)

George Wilkins talks like that, too.

The "half-white" McCaslins like Lucas speak with a milder dialect:

"We don't want no voce [divorce]. I done changed my mind."(2.3.3.60)

The poor whites don't sound much different from Lucas, with a lot of "ain'ts" and double negatives.

And of course, the educated whites like the Commissioner speak standard English. Standard southern English, we suppose, but Faulkner doesn't write in a distinctive dialect for them.

"Confound it, Carothers," the commissioner said, "what the hell kind of Senegambian Montague and Capulet is this anyhow?" (2.2.70)

Another person who speaks without dialect is the unnamed woman who bore Roth Edmonds's child. Her speech is as sophisticated as anyone's:

"Old man," she said, have you lived so long and forgotten so much that you don't remember anything you ever knew or felt or even heard about love?" (5.111)

We learn that the woman was raised in Indianapolis, so no Southern dialect here.

It's tempting to speculate that the more white "blood" a character has, the more "white" he or she talks. Neither Rider's family nor George Wilkins was part of the "half-white" branch of the McCaslin family like Lucas.