An Ecocritical Interpretation Of William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses

William Faulkner (1897-1962) is one of the most distinguished modern novelists in America in the 20th century. He is prolific in his career and has produced voluminous novels and short fictions, which constitute the Yoknapatawpha saga as termed by Malcolm Cowley. Go Down, Moses is his thirteenth novel, which is composed of seven interrelated and yet relatively independent short stories, of which "The Bear" is "the best short story Faulkner ever wrote." It tells the McCaslin saga, and hunting in the wilderness and the growth into maturity of Ike McCaslin is the main clue.The complex meanings present in Go Down, Moses have been probed by a number of critics from a wide variety of angles. Most critics focus on Southern history, black and white relationships, and the degeneration of large families of southern states, and Faulkner's technique of stream of consciousness and other writing technique. The emergence of ecocriticism offers a new perspective to read classic works. Some scholars have recognized the potential that ecocriticism has for Faulkner studies, and a few have begun to consider his texts from an ecocritical perspective. Though many critics notice Faulkner's extraordinary depiction of the wilderness and forests in Mississippi Delta region, most of them take the description merely as the background of the grand narrative, rather than examine the writing carefully to discover the underlying meanings. However, this thesis attempts to analyze the relationships between man and nature in Go Down, Moses according to the plots and make a ecological analysis of the themes of Go Down, Moses in order to demonstrate Faulkner's ecological consciousness.The theory of ecocritism is one of the literary approaches newly sprung and popular in the 1990s. Arne Naess, Fritjof Capra, Aldo Leopold and other's Deep Ecology substantially lay foundations on ecocriticism. Put simply, this philosophy...