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RESEARCH PRODUCT

A uniform hieroglyphic : Further shades of meaning in Go Down, Moses.

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This essay offers a new interpretation of the role of Rider, the protagonist of “Pantaloon in Black”, within the context of Faulkner’s novel, Go Down, Moses. Although this character seems to be one of the least important in the book, he may really provide a pattem for Faulkner’s larger designs. Rider’s obsesgion with bis dead wife, Niannie, the appearance of her ghost, and bis struggle, against bis own vitality, to die and rejoin her can be read as a parallel to Isaac Mc Caslin’s initiation into a dead Indian culture based on spiritual rather than materialistic values, and as a foreshadowing of Ike’s eventual renunciation of his birthright, the McCaslin plantation. The final implication is that the relationship between the living and the dead pervades the whole novel and echoes the essentially Romantic theme of the tension between material and spiritual values which is one of Faulkner’s and American literature’s central concerns. Paul.S.Derrick@uv.es