How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.[Part].Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
"I'm afraid he's going to find it," [Molly said]. Again Edmonds sat in his chair, looking at her. "Afraid he's going to find it?" Still she looked at nothing that he could see, motionless, tiny, like a doll, an ornament. "Because God say, 'What's rendered to My earth, it belong to Me unto I resurrect it. And let him or her touch it, and beware.' And I'm afraid. I got to go. I got to be free of him." (2.3.1.15-17)
Molly uses her religious beliefs to guide her decisions. She seems genuinely convinced that Lucas is setting himself up for sinful behavior. Do you think she took literally the phrase "What's rendered to my earth"?
Quote #2
[…] even though they knew at the time it couldn't and wouldn't last, they had touched and become as God when they voluntarily and in advance forgave one another for all that each knew the other could never be. (2.3.1.34)
Isaac reflects on the one and only experience of sex with his wife. They each had a lot to forgive (the conflict over the inheritance), but in that moment of union they accepted each other fully. This parallels one of Isaac's ideas in "The Bear": that God knew man was going to mess up big time, but created and forgave him anyway.
Quote #3
Then the other said what he had not intended to say, what he had never conceived of himself saying in circumstances like these, even though everybody knew it--the dead who either will not or cannot quit the earth yet although the flesh they once lived in has been returned to it, let the preachers tell and reiterate and affirm how they left it not only without regret but with joy, mounting toward glory: "You don't wants ter go back der. She be wawkin yit." (3.1.6)
Some people might see this as just a weird folk belief, but Rider's friend's idea that some souls don't leave the earth right away can be found in many traditions. Proof that this really happens: Patrick Swayze.
Quote #4
[The dog] stopped just outside the front door, where he could see it now, and the uplifting of its head as the howl began; and then he saw her too. She was standing in the kitchen door, looking at him. He didn't move. He didn't breathe nor speak until he knew his voice would be all right, his face fixed too not to alarm her. "Mannie," he said. "Hit's awright. Ah aint afraid." Then he took a step toward her, slow not even raising his hand yet, and stopped. Then he took another step. But this time as soon as he moved she began to fade. He stopped at once, not breathing again, motionless, willing his eyes to see that she had stopped too. But she had not stopped. She was fading, going. (3.1.10)
The words the narrator uses to describe Rider's experience of seeing Mannie's ghost paint this as a real, and not imagined, experience. And the fact that the dog also sees Mannie corroborates it. So it seems that Faulkner wanted his readers to treat this scene as a real encounter with a ghost.
Quote #5
"Whut faith and trust?" [Rider] said. "Whut Mannie ever done ter Him? Whut he wanter come messin wid me and—?" (3.1.19)
Impress your friends by using the word "theodicy" in a sentence. As in, Rider and his uncle debate theodicy—if there's a faithful God, why did he take Mannie? Rider's uncle has no answer for this.
Quote #6
[…] the wilderness breathed again. It seemed to lean inward above them, above himself and Sam and Walter and Boon in their separate lurking-places, tremendous, attentive, impartial and omniscient, the buck moving in it somewhere, not running yet since he had not been pursued, not frightened yet never fearsome but just alert also as they were alert, perhaps already circling back, perhaps quite near, perhaps conscious also of the eye of the ancient immortal Umpire. (4.2.14)
Now, we've heard God being referred to as a "watchmaker" but "Umpire" is a new one. As Isaac knows, there are rules of the game in the wilderness, and if you break them, you're out.
Quote #7
[…] the elevation of the [snake's] head did not change as it began to glide away from him, moving erect yet off the perpendicular as if the head and that elevated third were complete and all: […] he put the other foot down at last and didn't know it, standing with one hand raised as Sam had stood that afternoon six years ago when Sam led him into the wilderness and showed him and he ceased to be a child, speaking the old tongue which Sam had spoken that day without premeditation either: "Chief," he said: "Grandfather." (5.5.26)
Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes? Isaac might or might not have seen: a snake, the spirit of Sam, or the same spirit that Sam had shown him in the shape of a buck. The narrator doesn't clarify this for us. What's clear, though, is that Isaac's internalized Sam's belief that animals can be spirits of the ancients.
Quote #8
"He put them both here: man, and the game he would follow and kill, foreknowing it. I believe he said, 'So be it.' He even foreknew the end. But He said, 'I will give him his chance. I will give him forewarning and knowledge too, along with the desire to follow and the power to slay.'" (6.61)
Here's the question of "free will" vs. predestination: Even though God knew what would happen, he put animals in the world and left it up to man to decide whether to hunt and kill them. But he also gave him the knowledge that there might be consequences. Man will decide on his own whether it's right to kill animals.
Quote #9
He seemed to see the two of them--himself and the wilderness--as coevals [...] the two spans running out together, not toward oblivion, nothingness, but into a dimension free of both time and space where once more the untreed land warped and wrung to mathematical squares of rank cotton for the frantic old-world people to turn into shells to shoot at one another, would find ample room for both--the names, the faces of the old men he had known and loved and for a little while outlived, moving again among the shades of tall unaxed trees and sightless brakes where the wild strong immortal game ran forever before the tireless belling immortal hounds, falling and rising phoenix-like to the soundless guns. (6.66)
As an old man contemplating death and the afterlife, Isaac expresses another Native American belief: that heaven is a place of natural beauty where men can hunt and game is plentiful.
Quote #10
"Now [Gavin Stevens] could hear the third voice, which would be that of Hamp's wife--a true constant soprano which ran without words beneath the strophe and antistrophe of the brother and sister:
"Sold him in Egypt and now he dead."
"Oh yes, Lord. Sold him in Egypt."
"Sold him in Egypt."
"And now he dead."
"Sold him to Pharaoh."
"And now he dead." (7.2.75-81)
Gavin Stevens walks into Samuel Beauchamp's wake with the best intentions to console Molly and Hamp. He quickly realizes, however, that he's way out of his element. He's not used to experiencing this kind of overt expression of grief at a wake. Molly and Hamp are using the "call and response" so common in African American houses of worship.