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Gateway to the Fantastical Faulkner: Gateway to the Fantastical Faulkner:
?Pantaloon in Black? in the Development of Go Down ...
Submitted by ymacw on November 27, 2006
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Gateway to the Fantastical Faulkner:
“Pantaloon in Black” in the Development of Go Down, Moses
Go Down, Moses is one of Faulkner’s works that, while categorizing and describing behavior in the Old South, proves to be an uncanny mélange of short stories characterizing some outlandish personalities and outlining superstitions of Southerners. While the first few stories (i.e. “Was” and “The Fire and the Hearth”) do little to promote the supernatural undertones of the whole novel, “Pantaloon in Black” is the threshold that Faulkner fabricates in order to usher the reader into a world of supernatural and Native American-esque beliefs. A website called “Documenting the American South” says, “The most obvious feature distinguishing the South from the rest of the United States was its racial composition and the resulting historical developments provoked by profound sectional difference... Africans brought with them their myths and their music, their beliefs and their words.” This is an explanation of why the South has come to have so many superstitions: beliefs followed the Africans to the Americas and then integrated into the culture, creating wariness and fright among the Southerners. This also occurred with Native American traditions; wiping the blood of the first deer a man has killed on him, a process known as “blooding”, is still practiced all throughout the South. As seen in the short stories “The Old People”, “Bear”, and “Delta Autumn”, Native American superstitions and respect for the wilderness play a huge role. Because of the mundane mood of the first two stories, Faulkner has to create a portal for the reader so that he or she may be slowly introduced to the changing tone of the novel; this is accomplished in “Pantaloon in Black”.
It is interesting how the first two stories have next to or virtually no fantastical events occur in them. Some could argue that the flight of Tomey’s Turl in “Was” had fantastical characteristics like...
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