William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses is one of those novels that resists easy summary — and that resistance is precisely what makes it so worth discussing. In this episode of The Big Book Project, host Lori Feathers is joined by Faulkner scholar Larry Allums for a deep, unhurried conversation about one of Faulkner’s most structurally ambitious and morally searching works.

Go Down, Moses occupies a deliberately uncomfortable formal space — neither quite a novel nor quite a short story collection — and Lori and Larry explore how that ambiguity is central to the book’s meaning rather than incidental to it. They trace Faulkner’s decision to arrange the chapters outside of chronological order, examine why the McCaslin family genealogy is essential reading before the first page, and follow Ike McCaslin from boyhood to old age as he grapples with inheritance, land ownership, and the accumulated moral weight of what his family has done and left undone.

The episode gives extended attention to “The Bear” — the novel’s longest and most mythically charged section — where Old Ben emerges not merely as an animal but as something closer to a totem for the land itself. The mentorship of Sam Fathers, the ritual dimensions of the hunt, and the way Faulkner’s extraordinary nature writing creates a kind of sacred space outside ordinary human corruption are all examined at length. Lori and Larry also discuss the surprising vein of dark comedy running through earlier chapters like “The Fire and the Hearth,” and what it means that a novel published in 1942 already carries reverberations of World War Two in its most disaffected passages.

The conversation does not look away from what Go Down, Moses most urgently demands: a reckoning with the entangled bloodlines of the McCaslin and Beauchamp families, the unacknowledged moral debts of the slaveholding South, and the question of whether Ike’s celebrated renunciation of his inheritance represents genuine ethical courage — or a more troubling form of evasion.

Larry Allums is a William Faulkner scholar who previously joined The Big Book Project for the group read of Absalom, Absalom! His expertise and genuine love for Faulkner’s fiction make him one of the most illuminating guides available to this particular literary terrain.

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Chapters:

00:00 Introduction & Welcome Back to Larry Allums

01:20 Publication History of Go Down Moses

07:20 Non-Chronological Structure & Family Genealogy

13:00 Ike McCaslin — Childhood to Old Age

18:30 Humor in The Fire and the Hearth

27:50 Lucas Beauchamp & Inheritance

40:20 Interiority and Character Consciousness

44:35 World War Two in a 1942 Novel

47:55 Old Ben the Bear & Sam Fathers

55:50 Ike’s Renunciation of the Land

59:50 McCaslin Characters Across Faulkner’s Fiction

01:03:30 Final Reflections & Reading Tips