A wonderful, complex intertwined set of stories about the McCasslin clan, black and white, over the generations, as the sins of the fathers are certainly carried forward through the history of the antebellum and postwar south. Faulkner's prose requires a good deal of concentration, especially in the core story "The Bear", but it is worth the work.

Go Down, Moses marks the end of William Faulkner's period of greatest creativity. The themes he addresses in this novel built out of interconnected stories connect with and overlap those addressed in other of his works of this period, notably The Hamlet. Throughout the book the presence of time - past, present and future - is connected by the blood; the bloodlines of the family.

"to the boy those old times would cease to be old times and would become a part of the boy's present, not only as if they had happened yesterday but as if they were still happening," (p. 165)

The blood of the fathers, their 'curse', becomes one of the themes in the first three stories: Was, The Fire and the Hearth, and Pantaloon in Black.

"Then one day the old curse of his fathers, the old haughty ancestral pride based not on any value but on an accident of geography, stemmed not from courage and honor but from wrong and shame, descended to him." (p. 107)

The relations between the races and the nature of the family are presented here by Faulkner. The hearth suggests connections with the Anglo-Irish culture from which the McCaslins originated. After all the McCaslin's heritage is one of tension and guilt. The initiation of the young into this culture is presented in The Old People when Ike becomes a man, and is repeated in The Bear. There is also the theme of man versus nature through the contrast of the natural man with the social man of civilization. I sensed resonance with a Rousseau-like view of the world in the emphasis on getting away from civilization in The Bear. This can also be read in the tradition of Twain's Huckleberry Finn. Ultimately, we see in Go Down, Moses Faulkner's mythic world of Yoknapatawpha County once more with its people, their land, and their ghosts. How they relate to our world today is up to the reader to decide. ( )

"The Bear" is a phenomenal short story, but the rest are only so-so. ( )

Classic of american literature, this collection of short stories introduces the reader to Faulker's modernist literary style, as well as to the south which Faulkner perceptively portrays.

I finally finished Go Down, Moses by the infamous William Faulkner, and really, I wanted to like it but I didn't. The book consists of short stories that are put together to create a novel. Each short story is about a different member of the McCaslin family, as one reads through the stories, you can put a general family tree together, though it is difficult as a lot of the family members have the same name. Of course I found a family tree online after I finished the book... always helpful.

I've always heard that Faulkner was difficult to read, but last year I tackled The Sound and the Fury in a day and a half and absolutely loved it, so I thought that this one would be a piece of cake. Now maybe I didn't find this book to be gripping because I am not an avid bear-hunter, or hunter of any kind for that matter. I doubt that though, Faulkner's tangents that he would go off on about what? I don't even know, is really where I got lost. Where previously I found his stream of consciousness a breath of fresh air, here I found it overused and boring. While he describes the wilderness in great detail, I struggled to find a basic description of most of the characters.

And to top it all off, the copy I have of this book I picked up at a Library Sale without realizing that someone had written in it and underlined all over the place. So while I was reading I was wondering why this person was underlining sentences that seemed so unimportant to me... Am I missing something? Should I reread this sentence? This paragraph? I'll just move on.

So, overall I am giving this Faulkner a thumbs down sorry to say. But I still have Light In August sitting on my bookshelf, so it won't be my last. ( )