At its heart, Go Down, Moses is the story of a family—a big, complex family with slave owners, slaves, legitimate children, illegitimate children, and children born of incest. Most of the main characters in these stories are related to one another, and we don't really learn how until we plow through the book. In this sprawling family, all kinds of relationship boundaries are blurred and distorted. People have similar names, there are blacks and whites and mixed-race family members, and children aren't always raised by their parents. It's totally confusing.
Even so, the idea of family descent is a central theme in the novel. If Shmoop had a dollar for every time the word "blood" appears in this book, we'd be able to throw our employees one heckuva holiday party.
Questions About Family
- None of the stories in this book feature a family with both parents and all of the children present. Why do you think Faulkner might have left out these types of families from this book?
- Why are marriages of black characters given more ink than marriages of white characters?
- Does "family" always mean blood relatives in Go Down, Moses? How do the different characters define "family"?
Chew on This
Faulkner deliberately confuses us about who's who in the McCaslin family in order to show how arbitrary its whole power structure is.
In Go Down, Moses, family ties are the only way in which anything important (such as money, land, traditions, and education) gets passed from one generation to the next.