Go Down, Moses Themes

In a nutshell, Go Down, Moses is one very famous Southern white male's meditation on the slavery and its aftermath. Each of the seven stories here treats this subject from multiple characters' pers...

The end of slavery didn't mean the end of racism in the South. If anything, the turmoil of Reconstruction inflamed racial tension even more, as both white and black had to adjust to an entirely new...

At its heart, Go Down, Moses is the story of a family—a big, complex family with slave owners, slaves, legitimate children, illegitimate children, and children born of incest. Most of the main ch...

Real men hunt. White men, anyway. Real men drink. Real men gamble. Real men have all the say at home. Real men gather around the fire and talk real men's talk. Or do they? Well, there might be a lo...

Faulkner seems much less interested in his female characters in Go Down, Moses. We don't even learn the name of the wife of the main character in the novel, and we never really hear what the women...

If you happen to think indiscriminate progress is a good thing or that taming the wilderness makes a man a real man (and yes, we mean men—Faulkner's women don't get out much), then this book will...

We know right off the bat that Go Down, Moses is gonna have some serious spiritual themes. Since you've memorized this entire learning guide, you know by now that the title's taken from a song that...

In this one big not-so-happy McCaslin/Beauchamp/Edmonds family, you can't always count on people to do the right thing. There's a whole lotta betraying, repudiating, relinquishing, forsaking and de...