Go Down, Moses Analysis

Yoknapatawpha County might just be the only fictional county with its own website. You can listen on the internet to Faulkner pronouncing and defining its name correctly. You might not be able to v...

The stories in this book have an omniscient third person point of view that goes from one character's mind to another's. The characters are always described in the third person, but how close we ge...

Well, genre is a bit hard to pin down with this seven-story-long not-quite-novel, not-quite-short-story-collection of a book. Random House first published it in 1942 as Go Down Moses and Other Stor...

Since most of the chapters that comprise this novel were originally published as separate stories, the tone shifts as much as the genre—at times humorous or mocking, at other times serious, even...

Prodigious, Mountainous, Dizzily Soaring Wordiness No need to go digging around in the different stories for this one, folks. Let's crack open the very first section of the book (Section 1 of "Was"...

First, the easy part: the title of the book, Go Down, Moses, comes from the title of the last story, "Go Down, Moses." And the title of that story comes from an old African-American spiritual of th...

At the end of the very last story, attorney Gavin Stevens and the newspaper editor are driving behind the hearse carrying Samuel Beauchamp, who'd been executed for killing a policeman. The editor t...

"Oh, come on," we just heard you say, "Faulkner's a 20th-century American. How hard can his writing be?" We'll tell you how hard: about 40 different characters, a lot of them related to one another...

We'll break down "Delta Autumn" here for you. Read though this, Shmoopers, and try your hand at some of the other stories. How about "Pantaloon in Black"?Doe, A Deer, A Female Deer ("Delta Autumn")...

Here's what we think Booker would say about "Pantaloon in Black." Have a look, and then try your hand at "The Old People" or Parts Two and Three of "The Fire and the Hearth." Don't say we didn't wa...

We've analyzed "Was" here. Have a look and give "Delta Autumn" or "Go Down, Moses" a shot.The McCaslin twins' slave Tomey's Turl runs off to the Beauchamp plantation to see his beau Tennie. Buck an...

Caroline Barr, to whom Go Down, Moses is dedicated, was the African American nanny who raised William Faulkner. She was born into slavery and told him many stories about her experiences. Check it o...

This book has one sex scene (5.4.197-199), but you'll miss the steamy part if you blink. The act gets lost somewhere between the newlywed couple drama and the hundreds-of-words-long sentences. Faul...

The Bible: Molly Beauchamp likens Samuel's fate to that of Benjamin in the Book of Genesis, 44, where Joseph (who's hiding his identity from his brothers) secretly plants a silver cup in his brothe...