Transracial Identities in William Faulkner’s »Go Down, Moses«
Transracial Identities in William Faulkner’s »Go Down, Moses«

Summary/Abstract: Racial divisions are still an important issue in William Faulkner’s later works of the 1940’s but his outlook in this saga of the Old South seems to propose a more integrative view regarding the identity of the land. My reading of the novel considers the two dominant voices in the narrative: that of the last white descendent of an old, patriarchal order, musing on what was and on the sins of the fathers; and that of Lucas Beauchamp whose keeping alive the ‘fire’ of his marriage with Molly on their ‘hearth’ is symbolic of a long tradition of black endurance. In conclusion, what underlies the novel is, on one hand, a pervasive sense of fatality and of nostalgia for a lost part of integrity and, on the other, a parodic projection of an indeterminate future in which identities are blurred and fluid.

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