Reading Faulkner's Go Down, Moses with Dr. Larry Allums | The Big Book Project

William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses is one of those novels that resists easy summary — and that resistance is precisely what makes it so worth discussing. In this episode of The Big Book Project, host Lori Feathers is joined by Faulkner scholar Larry Allums for a deep, unhurried conversation about one of Faulkner’s most structurally ambitious and morally searching works.Go Down, Moses occupies a deliberately uncomfortable formal space — neither quite a novel nor quite a short story collection — and Lori and Larry explore how that ambiguity is central to the book’s meaning rather than incidental to it. They trace Faulkner’s decision to arrange the chapters outside of chronological order, examine why the McCaslin family genealogy is essential reading before the first page, and follow Ike McCaslin from boyhood to old age as he grapples with inheritance, land ownership, and the accumulated moral weight of what his family has done and left undone.The episode gives extended attention to “The Bear” — the novel’s longest and most mythically charged section — where Old Ben emerges not merely as an animal but as something closer to a totem for the land itself. The mentorship of Sam Fathers, the ritual dimensions of the hunt, and the way Faulkner’s extraordinary nature writing creates a kind of sacred space outside ordinary human corruption are all examined at length. Lori and Larry also discuss the surprising vein of dark comedy running through the novel.The conversation does not look away from what Go Down, Moses most urgently demands: a reckoning with the entangled bloodlines of the McCaslin and Beauchamp families, the unacknowledged moral debts of the slaveholding South, and the question of whether the McCaslins's legacy of inheritance is an attempt to rectify a wrong or a form of denial and evasion.Larry Allums is a William Faulkner scholar who previously joined The Big Book Project for the group read of Absalom, Absalom! His expertise and genuine love for Faulkner’s fiction make him one of the most illuminating guides available to this particular literary terrain.Subscribe to The Big Book Project for readings and discussions of novels that reward the full measure of attention you bring to them.Where to Find the HostThe Big Book Project on SubstackFollow on InstagramWatch on YoutubeChapters:00:00 Introduction & Welcome Back to Larry Allums01:20 Publication History of Go Down Moses07:20 Non-Chronological Structure & Family Genealogy13:00 Ike McCaslin — Childhood to Old Age18:30 Humor in The Fire and the Hearth27:50 Lucas Beauchamp & Inheritance40:20 Interiority and Character Consciousness47:55 Old Ben the Bear & Sam Fathers55:50 Ike’s Renunciation of the Land59:50 McCaslin Characters Across Faulkner’s Fiction01:03:30 Final Reflections & Reading Tips