Masters Thesis

Faulkner's Isaac McCaslin: curse and covenant

"Isaac McCaslin, 'Uncle Ike', past seventy and nearer eighty than he ever corroborated any more, a widower now and uncle to half a county and father to no one"— thus begins William Faulkner's novel Go Down, Moses. Even though Faulkner immediately—and abruptly—shifts to a time several years before Ike's birth, this sentence is an appropriate beginning, for Ike is the central figure of the book. To understand Ike's life, we must begin with his experience of 'wilderness. Ike's first full entry onto the stage of Go Down, Moses is in this passage from the beginning of "The Old People."

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