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William Faulkner in Go Down, Moses presents Issac McCaslin’s experience of wilderness and Kim, In-young. “Nature, History, and Ike’s Escape in Go Down, Moses.” Studies on English Language & Literature. 33.1(2007): 215-235. William Faulkner in Go Down, Moses presents Issac McCaslin’s experience of wilderness andhis sense of freedom in nature. This experience, however, gives him a delusive perception of freedom in society that he can be free from his southern heritance: the immoral slavery system. What is left for Ike to face is a dilemma which he can neither embrace nor reject without losing his authentic self. In this dilemma, Ike decides to reject his title to the birthright of inherited land because he believes that nobody should possess the land. In this paper, thus, I will examine what is called a trilogy of Go Down, Moses, “Old People,” “The Bear,” and “Delta Autumn” and explore how Ike’s vision of freedom is self-delusive and how his interpretation of Southern history is distorted with his desire to keep himself morally pure. Besides, I will try to manifest how Ike’s rejection of his inheritance is nothing but an attempt to escape from the burden of corrupted southern society. What Faulkner endeavors to show through Ike’s self-delusive life in this novel is an ironic twist of an individual’s life with a strong belief in God, as one can see in “Delta Autumn” which delineates that Ike’s life-long effort to get rid of moral corruption in his family turns out to be a total failure. This provides the reader with a chance to see that an individual can have a sense of truth that is fictitious and self-delusive; in the same way, a strong sense of identity on its own is more likely to be on a false presumption unless it is built in relation
to other people’s life. (Pai Chai University)