Race at Morning

WILLIAM FAULKNER
1955

INTRODUCTION

William Faulkner's 1955 short story "Race at Morning" is one of several of the author's well-known hunting stories. It was in fact Faulkner's last published hunting story. This is notable because the story ends in a way that indicates the end of an era, one in which it was once enough for a man to live off of the land, and when there were such things in the world as real wilderness and mystery. Often compared to Faulkner's famous long story "The Bear" (1942), "Race at Morning" reflects Faulkner's growing unease with the changing world around him. Written in a southern vernacular or slang, the story is a challenging read that is simultaneously a deceptively simple story about a deer hunt. The narrative predominantly takes place over the course of one day on which an unnamed boy and his guardian attempt, often comically, to chase a deer. In that time, the story explores themes of innocence and innocence lost.

"Race at Morning" was first published in the Saturday Evening Post on March 5, 1955, and it was published later that same year in Faulkner's collection Big Woods. A more recent edition of the collection was published in 1994 as Big Woods: The Hunting Stories.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

William Faulkner was born William Cuthbert Falkner on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi. Faulkner was the eldest of the four

sons of Murry and Maud Falkner. The family settled in Oxford, in Lafayette County, Mississippi, when Faulkner was nearly five years old, and he spent the bulk of his life there. Oxford was the model for Jefferson, the fictional town that appears throughout Faulkner's writing, with Lafayette County in turn represented throughout his work as Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner began to write poetry at a young age, but he did not begin writing fiction until his late twenties, when the famed author Sherwood Anderson persuaded him to do so.

Too short to join the U.S. forces during World War I, Faulkner joined the Royal Air Force, and it is likely that he changed the original spelling of his name during this time period in order to sound more British. Regardless, by the time Faulkner finished his military training, World War I had ended, although the stories he would tell about his time in the service did not reflect this fact. Upon completing his service, and without having received a high school degree, Faulkner returned to Oxford and enrolled in the University of Mississippi in 1919. He began writing for the school paper, and it was during this time that he experienced his first publication, a poem in the New Republic. Faulkner left the university in 1920 without graduating, moving briefly to New York City before returning to Oxford. His first book of poetry, The Marble Faun (1924), was not a success, and Faulkner moved to New Orleans soon after its publication in 1925. In New Orleans, Faulkner was advised by Anderson to send a draft of his first novel to a publisher, and Soldier's Pay was duly published in 1926.

In 1929 Faulkner published the novel Sartoris, the first of his many works set in Yoknapatawpha County. Indeed, 1929 was an important year for Faulkner; his first master work, The Sound and the Fury, was published, and Faulkner married his childhood sweetheart, Estelle Oldham Franklin, in Oxford. Estelle divorced her first husband in order to marry Faulkner, and she brought two stepchildren, Victoria and Malcolm, to the marriage. Faulkner and Estelle would themselves have two daughters, Alabama, who died in infancy, and Jill. The following year, while he worked the night shift at the local power station, Faulkner published his second master work, As I Lay Dying. Also in 1930, Faulkner purchased the traditional southern estate he called Rowan Oak, and the Faulkner family lived there until the house was sold to the University of Mississippi in 1972. It remains as it was when Faulkner lived there, preserved as a museum for his life and work.

In 1931, the same year in which Alabama was born and died, Faulkner published his first collection of short stories, These 13. The book contains some of Faulkner's best-known stories, including "A Rose for Emily," and it was dedicated to Estelle and Alabama. In 1932, while still actively publishing novels and short stories, Faulkner began to write screenplays, traveling between Oxford and Hollywood, California. His best known screenplays are Gunga Din (1939), and The Big Sleep, a 1946 film adaptation of Raymond Chandler's novel of the same title.

Some of Faulkner's other notable books are Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and Go Down, Moses (1942). Through the early 1940s, Faulkner's career flagged somewhat, and many of his earlier books were already out of print. Faulkner next regained critical attention upon the 1946 publication of The Portable Faulkner, and three years later he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Faulkner used much of the prize money to fund a prize for aspiring writers, now the well-known PEN/Faulkner Award.

Although Faulkner was hospitalized throughout his life for chronic back pain and alcoholic binges, he remained a prolific writer well into his late career. In 1951 Faulkner's Collected Stories (1950) won the National Book Award, and his novel A Fable (1954) won both the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize in 1955. Also in 1955, "Race at Morning" was first published in the Saturday Evening Post on March 5. The story was then published shortly afterward in Faulkner's 1955 collection Big Woods. It was also during this period that Faulkner acted as a cultural delegate for the U.S. State Department.

By the end of his career, Faulkner was splitting his time between Oxford and Charlottesville, Virginia, where he was writer in residence at the state university there. Faulkner died of a heart attack on July 6, 1962, in Byhalia, Mississippi. He was buried the following day in Oxford.

PLOT SUMMARY

"Race at Morning" is narrated by an unnamed twelve-year-old boy who speaks in southern vernacular. Set just outside of Yoknapatawpha County, the story opens as the boy claims, "I was in the boat when I seen him." It is unclear who the boy sees, but his head is out of the water and there is a "rocking chair" on it. This odd description does not make what is going on any more clear to the reader. Then the boy notes that it is dusk and discusses "the season" that will be ending the next day. The boy also makes a passing reference to "game wardens." From these combined statements the reader can deduce that it is hunting season and that the strange thing with a "rocking chair" on his head is a deer, a buck with antlers. Given the way the boy speaks about the deer, it is apparent that he has been trying to hunt this particular buck for some time. The boy is excited, as he plans to lay in wait for the buck with Mister Ernest the next morning.

The boy returns to the camp from the woods and tells Mister Ernest about what he saw, and they "et supper and fed the dogs." The boy then helps Mister Ernest play poker. The narration indicates that Mister Ernest is likely very old—he is nearly deaf and has lost some of his sight—and that the boy is meant to help Mister Ernest get around. One of the poker players, Roth Edmonds, asks the boy to go to bed as it gets late. Another player, Willy Legate, first suggests that the boy study if he is not going to bed and then pokes fun at him for being illiterate. The boy replies that he does not need to know how to write his name because "I can remember in my mind who I am." Walter Ewell asks the boy, "Man to man now, how many days in your life did you ever spend in school?" Willy replies for the boy, sarcastically implying that there is no "use in going to school" when the boy will just have to quit to help Mister Ernest during the brief hunting season. Willy then asks the boy why he never calls anyone "mister," and this is really a comment about the boy's lack of respect for his elders. The boy replies that he calls Mister Ernest "mister." Unaware of this exchange, Mister Ernest tells the boy to go to bed.

MEDIA ADAPTATIONS

• An audiobook of Big Woods: The Hunting Stories was recorded by the National Library Service and Potomac Talking Book Services in 1995. The collection is narrated by Barrett Whitener.

A little while later, Mister Ernest comes to bed, and although the boy wants to talk to him about the buck, he does not want to scream at the near-deaf man to do so. The boy falls asleep and is awoken by Simon at 4 a.m. for coffee, and everyone gets ready for the hunt. The boy feeds Dan (Mister Ernest's horse) and Roth Edmonds's horse, which the boy calls "Edmondziz." The boy comments that it will be "a fine day, cold and bright." This, according to the boy as he refers to the buck, is "jest exactly the kind of day that big old son of a gun … would like to run." After the camp eats breakfast, the boy gets the stand-holders for Uncle Ike McCaslin; stand-holders are used to reserve a hunting stand. A hunting stand (often a platform in a tree) is used to simultaneously hide from game and have a good vantage point from which to shoot at it. The boy reports that Uncle Ike is the oldest and most experienced hunter, so he will likely know the best places to wait for the buck to pass by. The boy also notes that the buck is very old, aged to a point that "would amount to a hundred years in a deer's life." Then the boy excitedly comments that he and Mister Ernest are "going to git him."

The boy, Mister Ernest, and Roth Edmonds send the dogs to Simon, who holds the lead dog, Eagle. Then Roth gets on his horse and Mister Ernest gets on Dan. Dan bucks until Mister Ernest hits him on the head with his shotgun, which he has already loaded. The boy climbs up on Dan, too, sitting behind Mister Ernest. They set off for the bayou with Simon and the dogs leading the way. Again, the boy mentions the fine weather, anticipating the way the sun will rise, causing the frosted landscape to sparkle and making the boy feel "light and strong as a balloon." Thinking about the fine day, the boy notes that even if the buck waited "another ten years" to be caught, "he couldn't ‘a’ picked a better one."

When the hunting party gets to the bayou, they see the buck's footprint, which is described as being "big as a cow's, big as a mule's." The dogs get so excited as they pick up the buck's scent that Mister Ernest tells the boy to dismount and give Simon a hand. The boy says that the buck usually lays in the canebrake (a dense patch of reeds) and waits for the dogs to run off after a different doe or other young deer before swimming out into the bayou and leaving the area. The boy notes that they are not going to let that happen this time. Roth leaves the group in order to cut off the buck and send him toward Uncle Ike's stands. Then the group continues on without him until they are near enough to the brake to let the dogs loose. The horse takes off after the dogs, and the boy hangs on to Mister Ernest's belt to avoid falling off of Dan.

The dogs find the buck, and the boy can hear it crashing through the canebrake. Mister Ernest maneuvers Dan as the boy points the way. The boy hangs on for dear life, commenting that "when the jump come, Dan never cared who else was there neither; I believe to my soul he could ‘a’ cast and run them dogs by hisself." The dogs and buck are now out of sight, though the boy thinks that they must be getting close to Uncle Ike's stands. Mister Ernest must think so too, as he reigns in Dan so that they can listen for any gunshots. When none are forthcoming, they start up again, but given how long they have waited, Mister Ernest and the boy know that the buck has somehow gotten past the stands without being shot at. The boy comments that the buck must be "a hant," or a ghost. As soon as he and Mister Ernest leave the thicket, they find Uncle Ike, who confirms what they believe had happened. Uncle Ike urges them to continue the chase before the buck makes it to a neighboring camp.

As the boy and Mister Ernest continue their chase, the boy observes that the sun has now fully risen and that the wind is picking up. Now and then the boy can hear the dogs when the wind blows in his direction. The boy imagines that the buck must be surprised to come upon yet another camp filled with people. He imagines the buck thinking, "Is this whole durn country full of folks this morning?" The boy imagines the buck caught between the dogs and the camp, wondering "how much time he had to decide what to do next." The boy then states that this time the buck "almost shaved it too fine," because he and Mister Ernest can hear gunfire now. They hear so much gunfire it sounds "like a war." The boy is very upset by this, as he and Mister Ernest want to get the buck "because he was ourn." The boy notes that the buck has been living on their land and eating their food and that they have been watching for him every hunting season.

Mister Ernest tells the boy to be quiet and listen, and the boy realizes that the buck must still be running because he can still hear the dogs chasing it. Sure enough, he and Mister Ernest pass by the group of men who had shot at the buck "looking at the ground and the bushes, like maybe if they looked hard enough, spots of blood would bloom out on the stalks and leaves." One of the men tells Mister Ernest that they think they hit him, and Mister Ernest promises to bring them the buck if this turns out to be true. As the boy and Mister Ernest continue their chase, they end up in unfamiliar country, having never had to run after a deer for so long. When they come to the bayou, they try to find a crossing, but rather than lose time, Mister Ernest decides to jump Dan. The boy sees a grapevine hanging in the way, but Mister Ernest does not see it, and the vine snags on the saddle, which slides off of Dan with Mister Ernest and the boy still on it. Both of them sit on saddle, hanging in mid-air until the vine snaps under their weight. Mister Ernest is knocked out by the fall, and the boy gets some water to throw on him. When Mister Ernest comes to, he yells at the boy for not warning him about the vine and for crushing him in the fall. He tells the boy to make sure he jumps out of the way if something like that ever happens again. The boy and Mister Ernest get Dan, who is waiting nearby, and they improvise a makeshift saddle tie before continuing the chase.

The boy notices that it is now afternoon. He can no longer hear the dogs, but he does hear more gunshots. The only other camp in the area is about thirty miles from their camp, so he realizes how far they have traveled. When the boy and Mister Ernest arrive at the camp, "it was jest like before—two or three men squatting and creeping among the bushes, looking for blood." This time, however, Mister Ernest and the boy do not stop to talk to the men. Mister Ernest instead turns the horse north, away from the chase. When the boy protests, Mister Ernest, looking "tired," tells him that the buck has "done done his part, give everybody a fair open shot at him, and now he's going home." Thus, the boy and Mister Ernest begin making their way back to the canebrake. The boy envisions the buck, Dan, Mister Ernest, and himself, as they make their way to their beds, in a sort of camaraderie. The boy observes,

"All three of us was still what we was—that old buck that had to run, not because he was skeered, but because running was what he done the best and was proudest at … and me and Mister Ernest and Dan, that run him not because we wanted his meat, which would be too tough to eat anyhow, or his head to hang on a wall, but because now we could go back and work hard for eleven months making a crop, so we would have the right to come back here next November."

Then, for the first time all day, the boy and Mister Ernest finally catch a glimpse of the buck. As the sun is setting, while the dogs lay all around panting, the buck rises up slowly, "big as a mule." He turns and walks into the thicket. "It might ‘a’ been a signal, a good-bye, a farewell," the boy thinks. Eagle stands before them with his legs splayed, looking defeated, and Mister Ernest stops Dan and tells the boy to look at the dog's feet. The boy knows the dog is tired and that nothing is wrong with Eagle's feet, but Mister Ernest insists. As the boy obeys, he can hear Mister Ernest's shotgun pumping, and he figures that Mister Ernest is checking the gun in case they get a clear shot at the buck.

The boy and Mister Ernest continue and indeed come upon the buck once more, the setting "sun sparking on the tips of his horns … so that he looked like he had twelve lighted candles branched around his head." Mister Ernest aims and fires: It is a perfect shot, but the gun is empty, and the buck turns and disappears into the thicket once and for all. Mister Ernest sits quietly, mumbling "God dawg." The boy promises not to tell anyone that Mister Ernest forgot to load his gun or even to mention that they saw the buck at all. Mister Ernest replies, "Much oblige."

The boy and Mister Ernest make their way back toward their camp in the dark, walking beside Dan. After some time, Mister Ernest tells the boy to "get on the horse" lest they "spoil him." In reality, Mister Ernest is just being kind to the now tired boy, and the boy relates that Mister Ernest was once his parents' landlord. Two years ago, the boy's mother ran off with another man, and the next day his father also abandoned him. After the boy was left alone, Mister Ernest came to retrieve him, and the boy has been with Mister Ernest ever since. Finally, the boy and Mister Ernest make it back to the camp, and the boy imagines the buck resting in its canebrake.

The next morning, hunting season is over, and the rest of the camp goes back up the river, leaving Mister Ernest and the boy alone. The boy says that Mister Ernest is not just a land-owner but "a farmer, he worked as hard as ara one of his hands and tenants." This, the boy claims, is how he knew he would get along with Mister Ernest, implying that Mister Ernest is a good man. Mister Ernest is a widower, so living with him was "jest fine … without no women to worry us." The boy says that they will be leaving the camp soon, though they like to stay for one day longer than everyone else, enjoying the leftover food and whiskey. After this day, they will return to their home to plant next year's crop. The boy thinks that he and Mister Ernest work hard all year to "have the right" to go hunting for two weeks and that the buck had to run for those two weeks to "have the right" not to be bothered the rest of the year. Because of this, the boy thinks that "the hunting and the farming wasn't two different things atall—they was jest the other side of each other." The boy says that once they put in the new crop, it will be November again before they know it.

Hearing this, Mister Ernest tells the boy that he will not be planting this year, and that he will be going to school instead. The boy protests because he wants to be a farmer, but Mister Ernest says, "That ain't enough any more," and he tells the boy that he must "belong to the business of mankind." The boy protests again, but Mister Ernest continues, saying that it "used to be enough—just to do right. But not now. You got to know why it's right and why it's wrong, and be able to tell the folks that never had no chance to learn it." The boy tells Mister Ernest he has been listening to Willy Legate and Walter Ewell too much and suggests that this is why Mister Ernest did not shoot the buck, emptying his gun on "purpose." Mister Ernest denies the first accusation but concedes the second, asking the boy whether he would prefer to have the buck's "bloody" carcass now or to have him alive and waiting to be caught next year.

The boy says that they will definitely "git him" next year, but Mister Ernest only replies, "Maybe." The boy scoffs at this, and Mister Ernest says that "maybe" is "the best word in our language, the best of all. That's what mankind keeps going on: Maybe." Mister Ernest then asks the boy to make him a drink, and the boy asks if he wants Uncle Ike's homemade whiskey or "Roth Edmondziz" store-bought whiskey. Echoing Willy's earlier chastisement, Mister Ernest chides the boy for not using the word "mister" when referring to Roth Edmonds. The boy replies, "Yes sir," continuing defiantly, "Well, which do you want? Uncle Ike's corn or that ere stuff of Roth Edmondziz?"

CHARACTERS

The Boy

The boy is the unnamed protagonist and narrator of "Race at Morning." He is twelve years old; his parents abandoned him when he was ten, at which point he went to live with his landlord, Mister Ernest. The boy helps Mister Ernest farm and also acts as the aging man's eyes and ears. Mister Ernest is the only person the boy will call "mister," indicating that Mister Ernest is the only person that the boy respects. Indeed, both Mister Ernest and Willy Legate scold the boy for this, but the boy ignores them. The boy is the first person to spot the buck, sparking the hunt that takes up the bulk of the story's narration. The boy is happy farming and hunting and does not want to go to school; he thinks it is better to "remember in my mind who I am" than to be able to spell his name. Unfortunately, by the end of the story, he finds out that Mister Ernest intends to send him to school.

Over the course of the hunt, the boy imagines what the dogs and the buck are thinking and doing. He even imagines what the horse thinks, stating, "When the jump come, Dan never cared who else was there neither." While chasing the buck, the boy imagines that the buck must be surprised to come upon yet another camp, perhaps thinking, "Is this whole durn country full of folks this morning?" Toward the end of the hunt, the boy describes Eagle as standing with his legs "spraddled and his head … down; maybe jest waiting until we was out of sight of his shame, his eyes saying plain as talk when we passed, ‘I'm sorry, boys, but this here is all.’" Through his empathy with the animals around him, the boy also respects them or holds them in awe, especially the buck. The "fine" weather is something of an omen during the hunt, and the boy describes the buck in awesome terms, calling him as "big as a mule." As the buck stands in the setting sun, the boy describes the buck with the "sun sparking on the tips of his horns … so that he looked like he had twelve lighted candles branched around his head."

Where Mister Ernest is wise enough to understand that the buck's value lies in the chase and not the kill, the boy shows his youth in his enthusiasm for the kill, his eagerness to "git him," and his dread that any other camp might beat them to it. Despite this single-mindedness, the boy seems to respect Mister Ernest's decision to remove the shells from his shotgun, promising Mister Ernest that he will not tell anyone about it and pretending that Mister Ernest had made a mistake rather than a purposeful decision to spare the buck. The boy also comes to a realization stemming from the hunt itself:

"All three of us was still what we was—that old buck that had to run, not because he was skeered, but because running was what he done the best and was proudest at … and me and Mister Ernest and Dan, that run him not because we wanted his meat, which would be too tough to eat anyhow, or his head to hang on a wall, but because now we could go back and work hard for eleven months making a crop, so we would have the right to come back here next November."

The boy comes to believe that he and Mister Ernest work hard all year to "have the right" to go hunting for two weeks and that the buck had to run for those two weeks to "have the right" not to be bothered the rest of the year. Because of this, the boy thinks that "the hunting and the farming wasn't two different things atall—they was jest the other side of each other." The boy says that once they put in the new crop, it will be November again before they know it.

Soon after, when Mister Ernest tells the boy that he must go to school to "make something" of himself, the boy protests that he is already doing so. He tells Mister Ernest, "I'm doing it now. I'm going to be a hunter and a farmer like you." To the boy, becoming like the only man he respects is the definition of "making something" of himself. The boy appears unimpressed by Mister Ernest's arguments about school. Indeed, echoing Willy's earlier chastisement, Mister Ernest chides the boy for not using the word "mister" when referring to Roth Edmonds. The boy replies obediently but then continues defiantly: "Well, which do you want? Uncle Ike's corn or that ere stuff of Roth Edmondziz?" Although he is unmoved by Mister Ernest's reasoning, it seems inevitable that the boy will be sent to school.

The Buck

The buck is a major figure in the story, representing perseverance, desire, and wildness, among other things. The buck must be smart, as it usually disappears from the area on the first day of hunting season and only reappears after the season has closed. The boy says that it is almost as if the "game wardens had give him a calendar." This year, however, the buck appears a day early, almost as if he's accidentally "mixed up" the dates. Indeed, there is something almost fateful about the buck's appearance. On the day of the hunt, the boy comments that it will be "a fine day, cold and bright." This, according to the boy as he refers to the buck, is "jest exactly the kind of day that big old son of a gun … would like to run." Later, referring to the good weather, the boy says that even if the buck waited "another ten years" to be caught, "he couldn't ‘a’ picked a better one."

The buck is old and big, living to what "would amount to a hundred years in a deer's life." Interestingly, it was once thought that the number of antlers on a buck indicated its age, and under this belief the buck would be twelve years old, just like the boy. The buck's footprint is described as being "big as a cow's, big as a mule's." Despite his size, though, the buck is able to evade the first set of hunting stands almost as if he is "a hant." Throughout the hunt, the boy imagines the buck's thoughts and movements. At one point, he imagines the buck thinking, "Is this whole durn country full of folks this morning?"

Despite wanting to hunt down the buck, Mister Ernest, the boy, and the rest of the hunting party respect the very animal they are trying to kill. At the end of the day when Mister Ernest turns toward home, he says the buck has "done done his part, give everybody a fair open shot at him, and now he's going home."

When Mister Ernest and the boy first come face to face with the buck, it is described in terms that are magnificent and respectful, almost awesome. The sun is setting as the buck rises up slowly, "big as a mule." When they next catch sight of him, he stands magnificently with the setting "sun sparking on the tips of his horns … so that he looked like he had twelve lighted candles branched around his head." Mister Ernest aims and fires. It is a perfect shot, but the gun is empty. Mister Ernest has gained so much respect for the animal that he has emptied his shotgun of its ammunition on purpose, understanding that it is more important for the buck to be waiting for him and the boy next year than lying dead in the camp. The boy, too, comes to his own understanding of the buck, believing that he and Mister Ernest work hard all year to "have the right" to go hunting for two weeks and that the buck had to run for those two weeks to "have the right" not to be bothered the rest of the year.

Dan

Dan is Mister Ernest's horse. He runs in the hunt with Mister Ernest and the boy riding him. Dan provides much of the comic relief in the story. The horse regularly tries to buck his riders and only stops when he is hit in the shoulders with the butt of Mister Ernest's gun. Dan jumps obstacles with little regard for his riders, ultimately leaving Mister Ernest and the boy hanging in midair on an empty saddle like cartoon characters. When Dan cannot jump an obstacle, he crawls under it, with the boy describing Dan as "crawling on his knees like a mole or a big coon." The boy also says of Dan that, "when the jump come, Dan never cared who else was there neither; I believe to my soul he could ‘a’ cast and run them dogs by hisself."

Eagle

Eagle is the lead dog in the chase, and he strains at the leash to go after the buck before Simon releases him. All of the other dogs follow Eagle. As the chase progresses, the boy can hear Eagle barking and imagines that Eagle is saying, "There he goes." The boy also knows what the other hunters do not: he knows that they could not have shot the buck because Eagle would have bayed to alert them to any blood. The dogs chase the buck from dawn to dusk before finally giving up. When the boy comes across the tired pack, he describes Eagle as standing with his legs "spraddled and his head … down; maybe jest waiting until we was out of sight of his shame, his eyes saying plain as talk when we passed, ‘I'm sorry, boys, but this here is all.’"

Roth Edmonds

Roth Edmonds is one of the hunters in the camp. When it gets late, he jokingly tells the boy to go to bed while he and the other men play poker. Aside from Mister Ernest, Roth is the only other hunter with a horse. He starts the hunt with Simon, the dogs, Mister Ernest, the boy, and Dan. After the chase begins, Roth leaves the little group to herd the buck toward Uncle Ike's hunting stands. After he has done his part in the hunt, Roth goes back to the camp and prepares to return to town, leaving some of his store-bought whiskey behind. The boy often refers to Roth disrespectfully and in vernacular, calling the man's horse and whiskey "Roth Edmondziz."

Mister Ernest

Mister Ernest is the boy's guardian, having been so for the past two years. He is older and slightly hard of hearing and has poor eyesight. Because of these handicaps, the boy acts as Mister Ernest's eyes and ears during the hunt, sitting behind him on the horse and telling him which way to go. Mister Ernest is a landowner. The boy and his family were Mister Ernest's tenants, but after the boy's parents abandoned him, Mister Ernest took him in. Mister Ernest is described as a good man who works "as hard as ara one of his hands and tenants." At the end of the hunt, when the boy is tired, Mister Ernest tells the boy to get on the horse since they do not want to "spoil him," but he is really giving the boy a chance to rest. Mister Ernest also shows his true nature by surreptitiously removing the ammunition from his gun before coming upon the buck. Mister Ernest understands that the buck is worth more alive than dead, that the point of chasing the buck is the chase itself. He also recognizes a degree of morality in the buck, declaring that the buck is returning to its territory after having "done his part, give everybody a fair open shot at him."

Mister Ernest is the only man in the story whom the boy respects. The boy calls him, and only him, "mister," even after Mister Ernest asks the boy to refer to others with the same respect. Mister Ernest understands that as the boy grows older, he must go to school, stating that the world has changed and that being a farmer "ain't enough anymore." He tells the boy that he must "belong to the business of mankind," claiming that it "used to be enough—just to do right. But not now. You got to know why it's right and why it's wrong, and be able to tell the folks that never had no chance to learn it." Yet, even in a world where one must know what is right and what is wrong and why, Mister Ernest asserts that "maybe" is "the best word in our language, the best of all. That's what mankind keeps going on: Maybe." This is a complex juxtaposition of ideas, one that reveals that Mister Ernest is not only a good man but also something of a philosopher. Mister Ernest acts as a catalyst, or agent of change, in the story, determining the outcome of the hunt and the course of the boy's life.

Walter Ewell

Walter Ewell is one of the hunters in the camp. While he plays poker with the other men, he, like Willy Legate, makes fun of the boy for being illiterate and for never going to school or studying. It is fair to assume that Walter is one of the hunters at Uncle Ike's stands, waiting to shoot the buck when he runs by. After he has done his part in the hunt, Walter returns to the camp and prepares to return to town. The boy holds Walter's and Willy's talk responsible for leading Mister Ernest to unload his gun before shooting at the buck and also for persuading Mister Ernest to send him to school.

Willy Legate

Willy Legate is one of the hunters in the camp. While he plays poker with the other men, he makes fun of the boy, along with Walter Ewell, for being illiterate and for never going to school or studying. Willy also asks the boy why he never calls anyone "mister," commenting on the boy's lack of respect for his elders. It is fair to assume that Willy is one of the hunters at Uncle Ike's stands, waiting to shoot the buck when he runs by. After doing his part in the hunt, Willy, like Walter, returns to the camp and prepares to return to town. The boy holds Willy's and Walter's talk responsible for leading Mister Ernest to unload his gun before shooting at the buck and also for persuading Mister Ernest to send him to school.

Uncle Ike McCaslin

Uncle Ike McCaslin is the oldest and most experienced hunter in the camp, and because of this, he is in charge of reserving the hunting stands that he thinks the buck is most likely to run by. When the buck gets past the stands, Uncle Ike is shocked, and he urges the boy and Mister Ernest to go after the buck before he enters a neighboring camp. Like many of the other hunters, Uncle Ike returns to the camp after he has done his part in the hunt, preparing to return to town. Uncle Ike leaves some of his homemade whiskey behind.

Simon

Simon appears to be the camp's helper or servant. He is the one who cooks the meals, and he comes out in the dark to help Mister Ernest and the boy back to camp following the hunt. He is also the person who takes the rest of the hunting party back to town. Simon is in charge of the hunting dogs, and he releases the lead dog, Eagle, on Mister Ernest's command.

THEMES

Respect

Much is made of respect in "Race at Morning." The boy deeply respects Mister Ernest, and this is evidenced by the fact that he uses the term "mister" when referring to him. Indeed, he exclusively uses the term to refer to his guardian. The boy remains steadfast in this practice despite Willy Legate's comments and even despite the request of the very man he respects. The boy admires Mister Ernest not only because he adopted him in all but name but also because Mister Ernest is a landowner who is also "a farmer," a man who "works as hard as ara one of his hands and tenants." Furthermore, though the boy may not agree with Mister Ernest's decision to spare the buck's life, he respects and honors that decision by promising not to tell anyone about the incident.

The boy also shows respect for the buck. Though he may want to kill the animal, he also shows empathy for it, imagining what the buck is thinking and doing at given moments. The boy holds the buck in awe, describing it often in magnificent terms. He even comes to respect the animal more over the course of the story, becoming aware of the symbiotic, or closely joined, relationship he shares with the buck. The boy realizes that the buck has to run for those two weeks to "have the right" not to be bothered the rest of the year, and that he and Mister Ernest work hard all year to "have the right" to go hunting for two weeks. The boy understands that the buck does not run from them "because he was skeered, but because running was what he done the best and was proudest at."

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

• "Race at Morning" is written in a way that attempts to accurately capture the way people speak; that is, in vernacular. Write a brief story in standard English and then rewrite it in vernacular. How does the tone, or feeling, of the story change between the two versions?
• Research education and literacy rates in Mississippi during the 1950s. Was school attendance mandatory? How many children, like the boy in Faulkner's story, did not go to school? Summarize your findings in a report.
• Choose another southern writer, such as Mark Twain, Eudora Welty, or Tennessee Williams, and read some of his or her work. In an essay, compare and contrast your selection with Faulkner's work. Are the themes and language similar or different? How so?
• There are no female characters in "Race at Morning." In fact, the only passing mention of women in the story portrays them in a derogatory light. Research social attitudes toward women in the 1950s, focusing especially on attitudes in the South. How are these attitudes reflected, or not reflected, in the story? Give a class presentation on the topic.

Mister Ernest also shows respect for the buck, so much so that he refuses to kill it. It is enough for Mister Ernest to chase the buck, to aim and fire his empty gun at it. Mister Ernest understands the buck on a deeper level than does the boy. The

boy protests when Mister Ernest turns the horse away from the chase, but Mister Ernest asserts that the buck has "done done his part, give everybody a fair open shot at him, and now he's going home." Also unlike the boy, Mister Ernest respects the value of education, especially its growing value in a changing world—which the boy is unable, or unwilling, to recognize.

Loss of Innocence

The story is ultimately a chronicle of lost innocence, and this is reflected by the shrinking forest, both a literal and metaphorical symbol of the increasing pressure to "belong to the business of mankind." Indeed, the last passages in "Race at Morning," in which Mister Ernest tells the boy why he will indeed be going to school, are perhaps the most important part of the story. In a sense, it is almost as if the comical and fruitless, yet poetic, hunt that takes place for the main part of the narration exists only as a foil, or contrast, for the final passages. Indeed, the hunt is a portrait of a dying lifestyle. Unaware of this, the boy is a true innocent. He does not know how to read, write, or spell his name. He respects the man who saved him from abandonment and is blindly loyal to him. He exists in a world that is entirely free of women. He lives to farm and hunt, and he wants no more and no less from his life than what he already has. A life like the boy's was once more common than not, though at the time this story takes place (sometime in the early to middle twentieth century), it was becoming less and less common.

Mister Ernest is painfully aware of the changing world, which is why he has decided to send the boy to school. The boy protests because he wants to be a farmer, but Mister Ernest says, "that ain't enough any more," and he tells the boy that he must "belong to the business of mankind." The boy protests again, scoffing, "Mankind?" But Mister Ernest continues undaunted, saying that it "used to be enough—just to do right. But not now. You got to know why it's right and why it's wrong, and be able to tell the folks that never had no chance to learn it." Mister Ernest knows that the boy will not be able to avoid taking part in society, that he will be compelled to "belong to the business of mankind."

In his innocence, the boy lives in a morally black-and-white world, but Mister Ernest tells him that "maybe" is "the best word in our language, the best of all. That's what mankind keeps going on: Maybe." This statement indicates Mister Ernest's knowledge that the world—especially for those who remain dependent on and in harmony with nature—is an uncertain place, that no one can be sure of what will happen. He tells the boy that "the best days of [a man's] life ain't the ones when he said ‘Yes’ beforehand: they're the ones when all he knew to say was ‘Maybe.’" It is this acknowledgment of the uncertain and changing world that nearly closes the story, contrasting with the boy's final and staunch persistence in acting as if his life is not about to be forever changed.

STYLE

Vernacular

"Race at Morning" is told in southern vernacular, or a slang dialect spoken in the South. Examples of this are when the boy says "ara one" instead of "every one" and "skeered" instead of "scared." This stylistic choice gives the story a great deal of character and immediacy. It is impossible to overlook that the story is taking place in the South and is being told by a young southerner. Indeed, the story may be as much about the South as it is about the boy telling it.

The vernacular emphasizes the narrator's illiteracy and general lack of formal education, which is an important aspect of the overall story. Following the hunt, the boy is told that he will be sent to school. All of the other characters in the book speak in the same manner as the boy, so the reader understands that the people in the boy's immediate society are also relatively uneducated. Furthermore, the use of vernacular emphasizes some of the comical aspects in the story, such as when Mister Ernest and the boy are thrown from their horse. As Mister Ernest and the boy sit in the saddle that is now only supported by the vine that snagged them, the boy says that the vine is like "the drawed-back loop of a big rubber-banded slingshot." As they fall, the boy makes sure that he lands on Mister Ernest and not vice versa, and when Mister Ernest complains about this, the boy says, "You would ‘a’ mashed me flat!" Mister Ernest replies, "What do you think you done to me?"

First-person, Unreliable Narrator

The first-person narrator, the unnamed boy, dominates the story with his point of view. Part of the value of the narration lies in the boy's imagination; he tells the reader what must be occurring during the parts of the hunt that he cannot see. The boy also imagines what the animals in the hunt are thinking, from Dan the horse and the buck to Eagle and the other dogs. The boy's tone is very conversational, with a casual reference to an unspecific other being made in the first sentence of the story: "I was in the boat when I seen him." It is unclear who the boy sees, but his head is out of the water and there is a "rocking chair" on it, which is a rather confusing image. When the boy discusses "the season" and makes a passing reference to "game wardens," the reader can deduce that it is hunting season and that the strange other with a "rocking chair" on his head is a deer. Thus, with such a first-person narrator, the reader must infer what is going on in spite of any details being left out or construed in colloquial ways. This stylistic characterization is sometimes referred to as the unreliable narrator.

Symbolism of the Buck

The buck is a symbol for many things. When Mister Ernest decides not to kill the buck, it is almost as if he is making a conscious choice to turn away from the life of farming and hunting that has sustained him. This choice becomes clear when he informs the boy that he must take part in "the business of mankind," noting that hunting and farming "ain't enough any more." The buck is also a symbol of desire. The boy wants to capture the buck; yet, that which is desired can only be desired if it is not possessed. In other words, the boy cannot desire the buck once it is captured and killed, he can only desire the buck while it is being chased. Mister Ernest makes this clear when he asks the boy, "Which would you rather have? His bloody head and hide … in a pickup truck on the way to Yoknapatawpha County, or him with his head and hide and meat still together … waiting for next November for us to run him again?" The buck's power in part lies in the possibility of his being captured. Once killed, that possibility and power would be no more.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Southern Literature

A subset of American literature, southern literature is written by and/or about southerners. William Faulkner and his work are a part of this tradition, if not one of the definitive aspects of it. The American South is a region with a distinct culture and dialect, largely owing to the fact that the South was built as an agrarian (farming) society with legalized slavery, leaving it vastly different from the rest of the nation. This is the heritage of the South, and its distinct culture gave rise to a singular style of literature. Much of Faulkner's work is about southerners, and furthermore the stories and situations portrayed are such that could only occur within the confines of the South. Some themes and devices common to southern literature are racial tensions, class disparity, regional dialect (vernacular), emphasis on place, and man's relationship with the land. Other well-known writers whose work falls into this category are Mark Twain, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Tennessee Williams, and Harper Lee.

There are several notable periods of southern literature, stretching from the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. The stages are largely defined by historical changes in the South, such as the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the civil rights movement, for instance. One of the last defined periods of southern literature, known as the Southern Renaissance, is the period in which Faulkner wrote. This period reached its peak in the 1920s and 1930s, and many of the works produced in this time, much like "Race at Morning," mourn the death of the South's rural culture as it gave way to industrialism.

COMPARE & CONTRAST

• 1950s: In the South, racial segregation is enforced via the so-called Jim Crow laws. African Americans are not allowed to eat at the same restaurants, drink at the same water fountains, sit in the same movie theaters, or go to the same schools as white people.

  Today: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 legally ended segregation, yet segregation still exists in economic terms. Residents of inner-city ghettos, where most live below the poverty level, are predominantly African American.

• 1950s: A 1959 U.S. census report on education notes that the illiteracy rate in the South is 4.3 percent, the highest of all regions. The next highest illiteracy rate is in the Northeast, a mere 1.5 percent.

  Today: The U.S. census report on education no longer tracks literacy rates in 2000, instead tracking education levels, such as high school, college, and advanced degrees. This indicates that illiteracy in the United States is no longer common.

• 1950s: Female and African American writers producing work at this time, such as Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Zora Neale Hurston, are ultimately accepted as part of the canon of southern literature. Their work reflects the themes commonly found in the genre.

  Today: Southern literature is no longer as clearly defined as it once was, largely due to the culture's increasing homogenization, or uniformity, with the rest of the nation. Nevertheless, the works of contemporary southern authors like Cormac McCarthy and Edward P. Jones still reflect traditional southern themes.

The 1950s and the Changing South

Faulkner first published "Race at Morning" in 1955, on the cusp of the civil rights movement that was about to sweep through the South and change it irrevocably. Faulkner himself was a staunch advocate of civil rights. These particulars shed much light on the closing passages of the story. Mister Ernest tells the boy that it is no longer sufficient to know right from wrong, as one must know "why it's right and why it's wrong." Mister Ernest then goes one step beyond this, informing the boy that it will be his responsibility to impart this knowledge to "the folks that never had no chance to learn it." For a young man living on the cusp of desegregation, this edict is very powerful indeed.

The South at this time was also in the final throes of its transition from a primarily agrarian economy to a primarily industrialized one. Given this, one can take the meaning of Mister Ernest's claim that farming "ain't enough anymore" quite literally. In order to make a good living, more and more southerners entered into the burgeoning industrialized economy, working in factories and moving toward city centers, a process that had already taken place in the North a century earlier. Industrialized societies depend more upon educated citizens than do agrarian societies; for instance, it is not necessary to know how to read in order to farm corn, but it is necessary to know how to read in order to sign business contracts or review a machine's operating manual. Where individual farms can be relatively isolated, cities and factories are sustained by large populations of people living and working closely with one another. This is the "business of mankind" that Mister Ernest refers to. By the 1950s, in the wake of growing cities and shrinking rural areas, it became increasingly impossible to avoid modernized life.

CRITICAL OVERVIEW

William Faulkner is one of the most-studied and best-known American writers. The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying forever changed the face of American literature. Another of Faulkner's critically acclaimed master works is Go Down,Moses (1942), which can be classified as either a novel or a collection of related short stories. Set in Yoknapatawpha County, the book largely focuses on racial themes. The Mississippi Quarterly critic Barbara L. Pittman points out that "over half" of the text in Big Woods, the collection in which "Race at Morning" first appeared, is derived from Go Down, Moses. Faulkner, however, changes the focus of the material from race to what Pittman calls "the minor theme of the decline of the American wilderness and the simultaneous rise of the white man's civilization." Pittman also implies that because of this shift, Big Woods did not receive the acclaim that was lavished upon Go Down, Moses.

Nevertheless, there is much scholarly criticism of Big Woods and of "Race at Morning" in particular. The Booklist contributor David Wright says that the collection contains some of Faulkner's "most accessible and enjoyable writing." Hans H. Skei, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, asserts that "Race at Morning" is "Faulkner's most successful story from his later years." However, this success may be due to the fact that "Race at Morning" can be seen as "closely resembling the earlier hunting stories," as James Ferguson posits in Faulkner's Short Fiction. Ferguson, however, calls the story "didactic," stating that it has "turgid, flabby qualities." Commenting on the conspicuous absence of women in the story, Ferguson states, "Like Hemingway, Faulkner cannot portray an idyll involving women."

Countering these statements in a Herald Tribune article (reprinted in William Faulkner: The Contemporary Reviews), Coleman Rosenberger calls "Race at Morning" "a delightful story." Rosenberger notes, "The world has changed. But to the boy … the ‘pageant-rite’ [of the hunt] has its old power." The New York Herald Tribune contributor Lewis Gannett, in an article reprinted in William Faulkner: The Contemporary Reviews, does not feel that Big Woods suffers on account of its recycled content. Indeed, he states that "put together with new connective tissue—story, legend, poetry and memory—it is something new. It is Mr. Faulkner's fabulous Old Testament."

CRITICISM

Leah Tieger

Tieger is a freelance writer and editor. In the following essay, she explores the disappearing wilderness as it is overtaken by civilization in "Race at Morning." Tieger also discusses whether or not "Race at Morning" can be considered a coming-of-age story.

William Faulkner's work was often set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Adjacent to this setting was the Big Woods, where Faulkner's most famous story, "The Bear," takes place. The collection Big Woods, in which "Race at Morning" first appeared in book form, brings together "The Bear" and other stories that are set in the Big Woods. The stories often feature recurring characters at different times in their lives; for instance, the main character of "The Bear" is sixteen-year-old Ike McCaslin, the same person who appears as the old man Uncle Ike in "Race at Morning." By bringing these stories together in one collection and setting them so that they can be traced chronologically according to the progressive ages of the characters, Faulkner presents an epic picture of the Big Woods—of what they were and of what they have become. Indeed, Big Woods, in stories such as "Race at Morning," reveals that the wilderness is being quickly usurped by civilization.

In "Race at Morning," it is not so much the loss of the wilderness that is mourned as the loss of its attendant lifestyle. The time when it was enough to know wrong from right, to be a "hunter and a farmer," is no more. Although one could once choose to avoid "the business of mankind," that choice is not available to the boy, a fact Mister Ernest is well aware of. In light of this and other Faulkner works with similar themes, critics have commented that there is a parallel between "Race at Morning" and the biblical story of the Garden of Eden. Indeed, some interesting similarities and congruities exist. Where Adam and Eve are expelled from paradise because they have eaten from the tree of knowledge, the boy is expelled from his paradise because he must acquire knowledge.

This interpretation becomes even more compelling when one considers the absence of women in the story. Writing in Faulkner's Short Fiction, James Ferguson points out that in many of Faulkner's stories, "Eve has yet to make her appearance." Ferguson goes on to state that "in the case of ‘Race at Morning,’ it is her defection that has created the paradise." Mister Ernest is a widower, and the boy's mother abandoned him two years before the story begins, ensuring that, as the boy says, "it was jest fine … without no women to worry us or take off in the middle of the night."

WHAT DO I READ NEXT?

• One of Faulkner's definitive and best-loved works is As I Lay Dying, published in 1930. Like much of Faulkner's work, the story takes place in Yoknapatawpha County and is written in southern dialect.
• Mark Twain is arguably the father of southern literature. His most famous work, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), explores racial issues and the immorality of slavery. The book is likewise written in southern vernacular.
• The Making of the American South: A Short History, 1500-1877 (2006), by J. William Harris, provides a comprehensive overview of the history of the region and culture that gave rise to southern literature.
• Tennessee Williams's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), is another fine example of southern literature at its best. Where "Race at Morning" lightly touches upon the clash between the old South and the new South, this play takes the theme as its main motif.

Comparing the differences in "The Bear" and "Race at Morning," the Mississippi Quarterly critic Barbara L. Pittman notes that the hunt in the latter story is "fast and frantic," unlike the "still, quiet hunting" in "The Bear." Pittman concludes that the essential difference between the hunts is not their pace but the fact that the boy is not learning "the lessons Ike learned: patience, respect for the life taken, man's relationship to nature." Pittman even goes so far as to say that the reason Mister Ernest does not kill the buck is because of the diminished forest: "The loss of space and game in the dwindling wilderness forces the hunters to replace the hunt with a race." Pittman concludes that because of this, "the hunters are wise enough to see that [the hunt] is an activity empty of life-lessons." Based on this reasoning, it would seem that Mister Ernest hopes that education; that knowing what is wrong, what is right, and why; and that taking part in "the business of mankind" will teach the boy the lessons that can no longer be learned in the vanquished woods.

Another compelling argument regarding the wilderness considers the civil rights movement, which was beginning when "Race at Morning" was first published. Indeed, it is impossible to be unaware that the story is taking place in the South and is being told by a southerner. The story is as much about the South as it is about the boy telling it. If the story can be said to be a portrait of the South, then it is both a literal and metaphorical portrait. The shrinking woods are a literal reflection of the shrinking rural areas of the South, but they are also a metaphorical representation of the immense social upheaval taking place in the region. Based on these considerations, one could also interpret the forest simply as a metaphor for change and for the need to embrace change.

By pushing the boy to abandon what "ain't enough any more," Mister Ernest forces the boy to embrace change. The boy will be expelled from his Edenic life into a new world, one filled with more possibility than the now-vanquished wilderness. Mister Ernest even attempts to explain the value of possibility to the boy, stating that "maybe" is "the best word in our language, the best of all. That's what mankind keeps going on: Maybe." He tells the boy that "the best days of [a man's] life ain't the ones when he said ‘Yes’ beforehand: they're the ones when all he knew to say was ‘Maybe.’"

The boy's world is morally black and white. He respects Mister Ernest because the man works as hard as his tenants and because he has become the boy's guardian. The boy shows this respect in simple, yet certain, terms, referring to Mister Ernest alone as "mister" and ignoring all requests to refer to others in the same manner. This moral simplicity can also be seen in other aspects of the boy's life. For instance, the boy respects the buck but wants to kill him, believing that "he was ourn" simply because the buck has been living on their land and eating their food and because they have been watching and waiting for him every hunting season.

This moral simplicity, as sustained by the boy's unwillingness to change, is why "Race at Morning" cannot be classified as a coming-of-age story. In fact, critics never discuss the story in such terms. This would at first seem odd, given that "Race at Morning" does contain some elements essential to the coming-of-age story. For instance, the boy is on the cusp of adolescence; he participates in a ritualistic hunt; he comes to an understanding of his relationship to the buck and vice versa; and he is, as this essay has established, about to be expelled from his Eden. However, while "Race at Morning" contains some attributes that are common to coming-of-age narratives, it is missing the elements that are the most essential.

In "Race at Morning" the boy does not change, learn, or grow in any real, quantifiable way. Simply put, the boy goes on a hunt, fails to kill his prey, and looks forward to returning to try again next year. The only epiphany that the boy can be said to have is the realization that he and the buck exist in a symbiotic, or intertwined, relationship; the boy farms throughout the year to have the "right" to hunt, and the buck runs during the hunt to have the "right" to not be bothered the rest of the year. Yet this epiphany, unlike those in traditional coming-of-age stories, also called bildungsromans, does not reveal to the boy his place in society. Indeed, it almost reveals the opposite.

Perhaps, then, one could call "Race at Morning" a pre-bildungsroman, a portrait of the boy during his last moments in the primordial forest, just on the cusp of learning to take part in "the business of mankind." Regardless, the epiphany that will ultimately lead to the boy's enlightenment does not come from within. Instead, it comes from without, via Mister Ernest's decision to send the boy to school. This decision, then, does reinforce Pittman's statement that, on account of the diminished forest, "the hunters are wise enough to see that "the hunt" is an activity empty of life-lessons." Still, it is Mister Ernest, and not the boy, who comes to understand this.

Source: Leah Tieger, Critical Essay on "Race at Morning," in Short Stories for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2009.

Wiley C. Prewitt Jr.

In the following essay, Prewitt examines Faulkner's hunting stories, including "Race at Morning," arguing that the "natural cycle in his hunting fiction makes Faulkner's work peculiarly appropriate for an inquiry into long-term environmental change."

As an activity that brings humanity into contact with the natural world, hunting has become a vital issue in contemporary ecological debate. Some environmentally orientated writers believe that hunting can lead to a positive relationship between humans and the land. Such writing echoes the work of philosophers like Ortega Y. Gassett and Aldo Leopold who saw hunting as a positive and abiding factor in the cultural evolution of humanity and the thought of Paul Shepard who argued that hunting and gathering societies maintained the highest expression of human physical, social, and mental health. In contrast, some thinkers describe hunting as a dark anachronism that humans must strive to overcome. One of the best of these scholars, Matt Cartmill, offers the idea that hunters justify their killing in part by a perverse and false philosophical boundary between the values of human and animal lives. Thoughtful, ecologically concerned people remain divided with regard to the hunt wherever it occurs.

And few places contain a more abundant and diverse hunting legacy than the South. Scholars have often acknowledged the importance of hunting in the South. Social and cultural historians have characterized the Southern fascination with hunting as manifestations of innate violence, regional ideals of manhood, the need for indulgent recreation, or simply the subsistence needs of an often impoverished populace. Environmental historians interested in the South have only begun to use hunting as a point of inquiry for describing human interaction with the natural world. In one of the few environmental histories devoted to the chase, Stuart Marks created an intimate portrait of hunters in a North Carolina county by relying heavily on the oral traditions and hunting literature of the region. Hunting and its literature have been largely ignored as sources, as two critics recently complained: "our writers and poets have paid more attention to American hunting than have our academic environmental historians." Of writers who have used hunting in their work, William Faulkner has portrayed the chase with the most striking combination of realism and spirituality. His rich descriptions of the separate worlds of farm and wilderness in turn-of-the-century Mississippi invite a specific examination of the ways people lived with the land. At the same time, his hunting stories imply a mystical cycle of regeneration in which such large game as deer and bear are not only flesh and blood but spiritual representations of the natural world.

Faulkner wrote his hunting stories during a time of widespread environmental upheaval within Mississippi and the South. During his lifetime, habitat types and their accompanying game species prospered and declined in relation to the agricultural systems and socioeconomic interworkings of humans. As a hunter he encountered the effects of environmental change in habitats and game populations. As a hunter who was also a writer, the local environmental background must have influenced his fiction as much as did his region's history, culture, and society. My paper places Faulkner's hunting stories within the changing environmental context of his locale and his lifetime. It also shows that the idea of a natural cycle in his hunting fiction makes Faulkner's work peculiarly appropriate for an inquiry into long-term environmental change.

The land of North Mississippi in the late nineteenth century was a place of distinct dichotomy between the wild and the domesticated. Until the 1880s, land clearing and the establishment of farms proceeded in the upland areas and a in few well-drained bottomlands. The overwhelming majority of people engaged in agriculture to some degree, and that farming population was broadly distributed over the arable land. Large expanses of bottomland hardwoods stretched along the alluvial plains of rivers throughout the state where frequent floods and the costs of land clearing discouraged farms. Bottomlands were the wilderness counterpoint to settled areas all over Mississippi, located along rivers and streams both large and small like the Big Black in the central counties, the Pascagoula in the south and the Tombigbee in the east, in addition to Faulkner's Tallahatchie. Faulkner's imagery of a "tall and endless wall of dense November woods" juxtaposed with "skeleton stalks of cotton and corn in the last of open country" offer excellent illustrations that typified much of the land in Mississippi.

By the 1880s, however, Northern timber speculators began purchasing the timberlands of the South, sometimes for as little as one dollar per acre. Attracted first by the vast longleaf pine forests of the coastal plain, timber buyers soon moved to acquire the bottomland hardwoods. The timberland of the upper Yazoo and its tributaries, including the Tallahatchie, changed hands in their turns. Lumbering interests from the exhausted cutovers of the Great Lakes region bought the lands or timber rights from speculators as railroads subsequently crept into the bottoms, making it feasible to remove the timber in quantity. Timber cutting pushed back the Big Woods along rivers all over the state. The dynamic of clearing land, with the moving boundary of the virgin timber and the approach of the cotton farm, runs throughout Faulkner's hunting stories. Ike McCaslin remembered that in just some twenty years the logging train grew from an ineffectual example of human technology to an ominous portent of inevitable changes in the land. Across Mississippi the felling of the virgin forests took only about fifty years. From 1880 to 1930 sawmills reduced the vast stands of timber to only scattered remnants surrounded by farmland.

Wildlife populations responded to the land clearing and to what one scholar called "live at home semisubsistence farming." Until the years of intensive logging, the dichotomy between wilderness and farmland was reflected in the distribution of game in Mississippi. Large game like deer, turkeys, and bear occurred in wild unsettled areas while such small game as quail, rabbits, and foxes lived in the brushy margin habitats created by premechanized agriculture. Farming itself did not repel large game; the raiding of cornfields and the killing of shoats by Old Ben has some basis in fact. Rather, large game could not withstand the intensive hunting pressure from the hungry and well-armed rural population. The agricultural cycle allowed ample time for hunting and trapping both large and small animals by a farm population almost uniformly interested in taking a share of the game. Farm life encouraged a very direct and often subsistence-oriented relationship between people and local wildlife. Hunting and trapping were both recreation and important sources of protein for the farm family. Small game adapted to this constant pressure with high reproductive rates and by benefiting from the ideal habitat that smallfield agriculture provided. Settled areas sustained frequent and long-term hunting of species like quail and rabbits that thrived in close communion with humans while larger, less prolific species like deer and bear simply could not make up their losses and were confined to nonfarm habitats.

As timber cutting advanced, the cotton culture followed, bringing with it the habitat that favored small game and exposing the last refuges of larger animals. In 1928, more than a decade before Faulkner's hunting stories appeared, Aldo Leopold, one of the pioneers of modern wildlife biology and environmental ethics, conducted a historic survey of game in Mississippi and estimated that only a few thousand deer and turkeys survived statewide. Bears were so scarce that he ignored them as a viable game specie in the very state where Teddy Roosevelt's bear hunting exploit had led to the creation of that most familiar of toy animals. Compared with the near total devastation of large game he found adequate numbers of small creatures, particularly quail, that helped make possible what Leopold called a "widespread and intense popular interest in game and hunting."

It was in this environmental mix of diminished wilderness, disappearing large game, and the pursuit of predominantly small game that Faulkner developed his ideas about hunting and the human connection with nature. Scholars offer a multitude of interpretations that deal with "The Bear" and to a lesser extent Faulkner's other hunting stories. A common theme in interpretations is that the activity of hunting provides humans with a connection to the natural world that critics have seen variously as positive, negative, or both. However, not just any hunting will do. For Faulkner's hunters, only the pursuit of large game reaffirmed a bond between humans and the natural world. In his fiction, Faulkner made much of the distinction between hunting small game in the farmland and hunting large game in the Big Woods. Animals that coexisted with humans were somehow less worthy as game and Faulkner's hunters pursued them only as training or when nothing else was available.

Large game hunting, and particularly deer hunting, was in Ike McCaslin's eyes the hunter's reason for being. Deer hunting took place in the Big Bottom, away from the farm and the human dominated landscape. The chase for large game outside the boundary of the settled land gave a balance to the life of the young deer hunter in "Race at Morning" so that he could say, "the hunting and the farming wasn't two different things at all—they was jest the other side of each other." Deer were rare enough for a kill to be an event, and a proper first kill could become a rite that would initiate a novice into a group of hunters. Conversely, hunting the farmland became to young Ike McCaslin "the child's pursuit of rabbits and 'possums." And one can sense the disdain in Sam Father's voice when during a fox hunt he tells young Isaac, "I done taught you all there is of this settled country … you can hunt it good as I can now. You are ready for the Big Bottom now, for bear and deer. Hunter's meat." Years later, the elderly McCaslin surveyed the changes in the land he had known and mused that "now a man has to drive a hundred miles to find enough woods to harbor game worth hunting." The settled land was too understandable, its mysteries too easily found out. Sam Fathers taught Isaac before he reached ten years of age all there was to know about hunting the animals of the settled country while the boy dedicated his entire life to hunting the Big Woods. In Faulkner's work, small game assumed part of the less-than-noble character of civilization. Just as Isaac attempted to repudiate his family's land because of his perception of its taint of slavery, miscegenation, and incest, he also disavowed small game hunting because of its symbiotic relation to agriculture.

Faulkner rejected small game hunting in his fiction when rabbits, raccoons, 'possums, squirrels, birds, and especially quail constituted the most available game for Southern hunters, including himself. J. M. Faulkner remembered that Mr. Bill himself was an avid quail hunter and had a great appreciation for a fine dog and a good shotgun. Also, Faulkner's endorsement of wilderness and the pursuit of large game was significant because it emerged during a time when hunting writers were creating a vast body of literature surrounding that most typical of Southern small game creatures, the bobwhite quail. If, as some scholars suggest, Faulkner described hunting as a quasi religious activity of mythic and spiritual meaning connected to the wilderness, then other Southern writers recorded the parameters of a parallel cult of quail hunting in the settled country. Stuart Marks in Southern Hunting in Black and White found that as quail became more common after the 1880s hunting writers began explaining the practice of upper-class quail hunting and praising its virtues in a voluminous body of work that involved much of the South. The association of quail hunting with the upper class is due largely to the enthusiasm of wealthy Northerners who bought large estates in the South where quail hunting became a highly ritualized winter pastime. The editor of an 1980 anthology of quail hunting literature lists works by over fifteen different authors that cover over one hundred years. In the midSouth few writers were more closely associated with the rituals of quail hunting than was Nash Buckingham. A native of Memphis, born in 1880, educated at Harvard, Buckingham came of age during the same era of environmental change as Faulkner. The child of a wealthy banker, Buckingham hunted at some of the finest duck clubs in the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas and could afford considerable quail hunting time in the uplands of north Mississippi. In books and articles from the '20s through the '50s Buckingham reinforced some of the connections between the pursuit of quail and the upper class that Stuart Marks found.

In his 1936 collection of stories called Mark Right!, Buckingham portrays quail hunting as an extension of upper-class views and expectations for society. For Buckingham, one's social position translates into one's position in the hunt. In the story "Buried Treasure Hill" he reminisces over the quail hunts he and three friends took over the years on a large plantation. Only the upperclass whites hunt in the story, assisted by fawning black servants. They pass over a landscape radically different from the Big Woods, following well-trained bird dogs through "meadows," "old orchards," "ragweed flats," and the ruins of an antebellum plantation house. Their access to the game is associated with their agricultural dominion over nature and their social position, as opposed to any spiritual connection to the earth.

Nash Buckingham's quail hunts reflected the order the upper class wanted in society. In other stories Buckingham elaborated on the themes of good breeding in dogs, fairness to the birds, and an understood system of courtesy and respect between hunters. Poor whites appear in Buckingham's work, and they sometimes hunt, but generally only for food; the complexities of ritual are lost on them, like the rural blacksmith Mr. Fenley in the story "Carry Me Back." Buckingham and his friend accepted a challenge from Fenley that his pointer bitch Belle was a bird dog comparable to one of their animals. The hunt proceeded, Belle proved exceptional, and several days later as if to affirm that a dog of her caliber was out of place with a blacksmith, Buckingham purchased her and two of her pups, giving them what he termed a "Cinderella start in life." Fenley kept one pup, saying he could "kill over her all the birds he needed to eat."

Even though hunting literature associated the bird with the upper class, there were a great many Mississippi quail hunters and they more closely resembled Mr. Fenley than Nash Buckingham. Bobwhite quail, which Southern hunters invariably called simply "birds," were immensely popular as game and were generally available to people in farming areas. Almost every rural family had a shotgun and a dog with some level of ability for quail hunting. For those without guns or the money for shells, the birds could be trapped easily. Rural folk frequently sold or bartered quail in local communities, and wild birds were occasionally on the menu of Mississippi restaurants until game law enforcement discouraged the practice in the '30s and '40s.

A fascination with quail did not quell all regrets for the passing of the bottomland forests among hunting writers in Mississippi and the region. Even Buckingham himself, a devoted wingshooter, mourned the loss of the "unlogged wilderness" where he and his companions might happen upon a deer or turkey to add to their game bag. Hunting writers frequently depict specific places or times that give their stories meaning simply through inaccessibility and distance associated with the hunts they describe. Stories about the "Good Old Days" abound in hunting literature. Mississippi writer Reuben Davis left a poignant memory of the bottomland in his novel Shim. The novel turns on the hunting and early life of young Shim Govan, heir to a remote Delta plantation around the turn of the century against a backdrop of timber cutting and the expansion of cotton culture. Davis began writing Shim in the late '40s and his story lines parallel some of those in Faulkner's hunting fiction, particularly the role of Sam Fathers as a hunting mentor and the use of Old Ben as a symbol of the wilderness. Young Shim received his instruction in hunting and woods lore from Henry, his father's black plantation foreman. During a hunt at the end of the story, Shim's brother Dave kills a black wolf that symbolizes the old indomitable Delta wilderness before the arrival of the logging crews. With the death of the wolf, the spell of the free hunting life in the wilderness is broken. The next day Henry departes for a refuge deeper in the woods and Shim is left alone to ponder the enormous sawmill equipment that slowly approaches the forest he knew.

Nash Buckingham and Reuben Davis crafted a lament for the passing of the wilderness that combined a sense of regret and nostalgia with a belief in the positive progress of civilization. In their stories, hunters have the most to lose from the destruction of the wilderness, but they are unable and probably unwilling to save it. Ike McCaslin accepts a sad and inevitable end to the wilderness but simply continues hunting in the ever dwindling remnant of the Delta forest. Indeed there seemed little reason for optimism about the Big Woods of Mississippi and its complement of large game. Yet, within Faulkner's fiction, scholars have noticed a cycle of destruction and renewal among humans and the natural world. That cycle implies a chance for a future hunt absent in the work of most other hunting writers.

The idea of a cycle owes much to the reflection of Native American belief systems in Faulkner's work. Francis Lee Utley and other scholars have compared some of the rituals in the hunting of Old Ben to the ceremonial bear hunts of certain eastern Native American tribes. Further similarities exist in the commitment to the spirit of the deer that elderly Ike McCaslin finally articulates in the reminiscence of his first kill. In his memory he comes close to apologizing to the deer and dedicates himself to hunt thoughtfully thereafter in such a way as to honor the life the deer had given. Many Native American tribes believed that animals gave themselves to hunters who had shown the proper respect and had fulfilled various rituals in the preparation and the carrying out of the hunt. After the hunt, more ceremony followed in the butchery, division, and consumption of the animal, often concluding with a symbolic return of some part of the body to the earth. With the fulfillment of the rituals a hunter appeased the spirit of the animal, which then assumed another body. Sam Fathers had "taught the boy the woods, to hunt, when to shoot and when not to shoot, when to kill and when not to kill and better, what to do with it afterward." Thus, the deer that revealed itself to Sam Fathers and young Ike after the boy had made his first kill was both flesh and spirit, able to leave physical tracks, yet it was also the spirit of a deer that emerged from Walter Ewell's kill.

The system of reincarnation among game and the appearance of animals like old Ben, the large deer, and even the large rattlesnake as creatures of symbolic significance owe more to Native American belief systems than to a Judeo-Christian oriented interpretation of wilderness in Faulkner's hunting stories.While critics caution against attributing too much anthropological background to Faulkner's work, the idea of a cycle of renewal that is reminiscent of Native American ideology exists within the stories. Many critics interpret the snake that Ike encountered at the end of "The Bear" as a symbol of fundamental evil in the wilderness garden of Eden. Some connect the snake to the entrance of human evil into the forest, and certainly Ike McCaslin's comparison of the logging train to "a small dingy snake" reinforces that idea. In the light of Native American ideology, however, the snake suggests power, and certainly danger, but not pure evil in the Judeo-Christian sense of Lucifer in the garden. For many tribes in the Southeast, snakes represented an underworld, a terrifying place inhabited by strange monsters, but also according to one anthropologist, "the source of water, fertility, and a means of coping with evil." Since Ike's experience occurred in North Mississippi, we can assume that this serpent is Crotalus horridus whose local name of timber or canebrake rattlesnake closely links it to the forested bottomland. The rattlesnake was a particularly potent creature in Southern and Southwestern Native American belief systems. Rattlesnake motifs were common enough among the artifacts of the Southeastern Native Americans that in 1906 an anthropologist described the artwork on a sandstone disk from amound in Issaquena county as "the conventional, mythical, feathered rattlesnakes of the South." Thus Ike's reverential meeting with the rattlesnake immediately after he comes from the graves on the knoll may be an affirmation of the ultimate cycle of renewal that signified, in his words, "There was no death, not Lion and not Sam: not held fast in earth but free in earth."

The visions that young Ike experiences expose him to a mythical world in which he maintains a faith until the end of his life. After the spirit/deer reveals itself to young Ike, his cousin suggests that they participate in an economy of souls and bodies; as he tells Ike of living and hunting, he says "and all that must be somewhere; all that could not have been invented and created just to be thrown away. And the earth is shallow; there is not a great deal of it before you come to the rock. And the earth dont want to just to keep things, horde them; it wants to use them again." It was in that hope that Ike buries Sam, Ben, and Lion and it is in that hope that he approaches death and another dimension when toward the end of his life he dreams "the wild strong immortal game ran forever before the tireless belling immortal hounds, falling and rising phoenix-like to the soundless guns." If Faulkner's use of reincarnation imagery reflected some elements of Native American ideology, then that spiritual dimension must have a physical component that was possibly suspended with the death of Sam, Ben, and Lion but was not destroyed. If the deer that young Ike saw was both flesh and spirit, then we can expect that the spirits of the dead game have not utterly vanished and may some day assume bodies.

Even if one only accepts the implication of a natural cycle of renewal in Faulkner's work, it makes his view of the hunt vastly different from standard hunting literature and from straightforward laments for lost wilderness. The hint that the mysteries of nature might still be alive urges us to look beyond the decline of the traditional wilderness, and the high point of the premechanized small farm way of life. During the forties, forces emerged that would alter the habitat of Mississippi as drastically as had the lumbering boom and the cotton culture of the earlier decades. While a deepening agricultural depression began displacing the rural poor after the turn of the century, and rural exodus occurred between 1900 and 1940, the decades stand out more for the increasing density of the rural population in Mississippi. Farm acreage increased and the average acreage in farms decreased as the number of people actually living on the land grew. As agricultural historians have shown in their studies of the fragmentation of cotton production in the postbellum South, cotton culture and its share and tenant systems resisted change until government subsidy programs made it profitable to limit cotton acreage and technology allowed planters to produce with less labor. During the forties, agricultural herbicides, pesticides, tractors, and (by the end of WWII) a few cotton pickers appeared on Mississippi farmland. As farmers mechanized their operations, the need for tenant labor disappeared and agricultural employment began a sharp decline. From around 420,000 directly involved in farming in 1940, farmers numbered only 41,000 in 1980. In Mississippi, as across the South, the number of farms decreased and the size of individual farms increased.

Faulkner personally experienced the last gasp of small-scale farming during what Joel Williamson called his "Greenfield years." After Faulkner purchased the 320 acres he called Greenfield, he brought in several tenant families and in testimony to the times lost a good deal of money, subsidizing the operation with his writing income. Williamson sets the dates for Faulkner's interest in his farm from 1938 to the early 1950s, coinciding with the time of transformation in Mississippi agriculture. The fact that Faulkner was a writer and not a farmer certainly contributed to the failure of Greenfield as a viable operation; however, his experience followed the pattern of most small farms throughout the state. As the position of the small farmer grew more untenable, many families joined the migration from the state or simply commuted to work in the towns. Mechanized agriculture concentrated in the flat expanses of blackland prairie and in the Delta, while the long-farmed upland began losing its rural population. And more importantly for the habitat of the uplands, the decline of premechanized farming took people out of a direct relationship with the land. With agriculture in the hands of a small cadre of professional farmers, what rural life there was became simply living outside the city rather than a personal struggle with nature on a day to day basis.

Abandoned farmland in north Mississippi returned to various forest types, sometimes regenerating on its own to a mix of oak, hickory, and shortleaf pine and sometimes through the planting of loblolly pine seedlings. Lafayette County followed a pattern of reforestation typical of north Mississippi with the addition that Oxford was the headquarters of the forestry division of the YazooLittle Tallahatchie Flood Control Project. The Y-L T, as it is known in Forest Service literature, grew out of the 1928 Flood Control Act. Its environmental impact on the upland areas included dams on the tributaries of the Yazoo constructed by the Corps of Engineers, including the Tallahatchie in 1940 and the Yocona in 1953. The Forest Service planted over 600,000 acres to trees, primarily loblolly pine, in parts of nineteen counties after 1948. From 1949 to 1959 Forest Service personnel helped plant some 39,000,000 young pines in Lafayette County alone. Joel Williamson argued that Faulkner recognized the end of the small farm and the move to town in his Snopes trilogy and that he had abandoned his own plain farmer persona by 1959. Significantly, in September of that same year the Oxford Eagle published an eight-page section praising the "growth and advancement made in the field of forestry in this county" and Oxford's mayor Pete McElreath issued a proclamation anointing the town the "Reforestation Capital of the World."

The abandoned farms of the uplands and the general depopulation of the countryside brought back a wealth of opportunities for the large game that Faulkner's hunters had found so important. The Mississippi Game and Fish Commission had created refuges, purchased deer from other states, and attempted deer restocking on a small scale since its inception in 1932. After WWII, with Federal money and more manpower, the Commission began an aggressive restocking program with deer trapped on Mississippi refuges that targeted suitably depopulated areas. Deer responded well to the releases, and the population showed steady growth to an estimate of around 20,000 in 1947. That year the Commission estimated the deer kill at around 1500 statewide with most still concentrated in the last of the Delta bottoms that had escaped the saw and the plow in the counties of Warren, Sharkey, Issaquena, and Yazoo, those lowest parts of the Delta that Faulkner called "the notch where the hills and the Big River met." Hunters in Lafayette, Marshall, and Benton counties killed around ninety deer in 1947 primarily out of the Holly Springs National Forest areas. Sixteen years later, whitetails numbered about 160,000 statewide and the Lafayette County kill was over 300. Turkey restocking also proved successful after biologists perfected capture techniques for the wild birds, and by 1960 the population stood close to 35,000. The Bottomlands of the Delta, once the richest environment of the state, had become in biological terms, a howling wasteland of monocultural agribusiness. Nonmigratory game species in the Delta retreated to the batture forest between the Mississippi river levees and the isolated patches of forest on either public land or hunting clubs. And in a further exercise in irony, much of the small game regime of the state began collapsing as the upland forest returned. Today, the memories of the quail hunting tradition can generate as much nostalgia among north Mississippi hunters as the vestiges of deer hunting fostered in 1940. Across Mississippi, counties that had not held deer and turkey for generations now supported hunting seasons. Through a cycle of wilderness destruction, a wrenching dislocation of the rural poor, and the rise of agribusiness, large game found refuge in a new forest on the Mississippi upland where the hunt continues; sometimes in that familiar "gray and constant light of the late November dawn."

The new upland forest is not as majestic as the virgin bottomland timber, and modern forestry's emphasis on loblolly pine monoculture sometimes inhibits its potential biological diversity. Yet the withdrawal of a large human population from an intimate daily contact with the countryside and its wildlife has renewed the possibility of if not wilderness, then at least an alternative to the city and the cotton field that Faulkner would have appreciated. As people have withdrawn further from the daily facts of sustaining life, the counterpoint to a human dominated environment can be just beyond the air conditioning and the mowed lawn. And in parts of the forest where deer and turkey returned some biologists believe the bear can follow. Possibly fifty black bear inhabit the timberland of extreme southwestern Mississippi in addition to an undetermined number in the batture lands between the levees of the Mississippi River. The Mississippi survivors along with larger numbers of bears in the Tensas and Atchafalaya basins of Louisiana are slowly increasing and, though anything like a restoration of the bear to its historic range may be impossible, the fact of a small growing population is a miraculous testimony to the regeneration of wild places in Mississippi. The regeneration of game populations can astound us even today. Not due to any one factor or group of people and not without its own set of environmental problems, the recovery of large game must be seen as a part of ongoing changes in the land. Through his hunting stories, Faulkner left us a faith in the resilience of the natural world and the chance to see ourselves as only parts of a broad cycle of life and death. If we can truly recognize our place in the land with the creatures we hunt, we will have gone a long way toward the humility young Ike McCaslin sought.

Source: Wiley C. Prewitt Jr., "Return of the Big Woods: Hunting and Habitat in Yoknapatawpha," in Faulkner and the Natural World: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1996, edited by Donald M. Kartinganer and Ann J. Abadie, University Press of Mississippi, 1999, pp. 198-221.

Barbara L. Pittman

In the following excerpt, Pittman considers "Race at Morning" in the larger context of BigWoods, arguing that the four stories point to the "apocalypse of the wilderness" and a turn to a new way of life.

…Big Woods contains more than just a desire to retrieve the lost wilderness. Embodied in the idea of wilderness is the "wild"—a quality both feared and desired, and a quality frequently attributed to the African and Native Americans who are a part of both narratives in Big Woods. When the wilderness was a dominant landscape, whites enjoyed the position of dominance in America. Thus, the lament for the loss of a dominating wilderness masks a lament for the lost of white domination. This narrative of domination in Big Woods is even more important in the historical context of post-Brown v. Board of Education 1955, when racial segregation in America is being openly challenged, particularly in Faulkner's South. For Faulkner to refigure his earlier text about racial injustice into this "nice book" that laments the loss of that condition, not only reveals some of the frustration and tension that moderate Southern whites were feeling as their society was daily dissected by the national media, but also speaks the unspeakable desire to dominate. My analysis begins with a lengthy discussion of how Big Woods instructs the formation of myth as the deconstruction of its "apocalyptic discourse. The four rifled stories represent a narrative "reality" beginning when the wilderness was still dominant, and illustrate the actual physical decline of the wilderness along with the loss of hunting ethics; the italicized narrative utilizes an oracular narrative voice, and exemplifies the myth that will survive physical extinction; the drawings, in collaboration with the written text, reinforce the idea of myth in their interpretation of the text. Finally, I will return to Morrison and to the historical circumstances that motivate Faulkner to excise race, to represent the loss of an empowering wilderness, and to preserve the past in a static myth. I hope to show how Faulkner creates a complex narrative structure that both masks and maintains the power of domination.

The first task of an apocalyptic text is "revelation of the apocalypse" (Derrida, p. 87). Faulkner makes the revelation in the four titled stories that focus on Isaac (Ike) McCaslin and progress in time from his boyhood initiation into hunting to his position as the elder, experienced hunter. The episodic selection of stories reveals to the reader not only the end of the wilderness but also the end of the hunting ethics learned there. The order of the first two stories—"The Bear" and "The Old People"—is reversed from the Go Down, Moses order. This reversal helps to illustrate the types of values that like Ike learns in the wilderness, and how those values become part of his identity, a movement that parallels the larger movement from history to myth. Thus, when we see in the second pair of stories—"A Bear Hunt" and "Race at Morning"—the decline of such values, we sense the ending of the environment that produced them.

The first titled story, "The Bear," preaches the end of the wilderness as near at hand—a "doomed" environment "whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with plows and axes"; already the bear is "an anachronism," an "apotheosis of the old wild life." Thus, Isaac is initiated into a way of life in its last stages; in Big Woods, Isaac is the last man, a role he senses even in his youth:

It seemed to him that something, he didn't know what, was beginning; had already begun. It was like the last act on a set stage. It was the beginning of the end of something, he didn't know what except that he would not grieve. He would be humble and proud that he had been found worthy to be a part of it too or even just to see it too.

As the last man of this wilderness, the last one to inherit the teachings of Sam Fathers, Isaac appropriately becomes "as competent in the woods as many grown men with the same experience," a "better woodsman" than either General Compson or McCaslin Edmonds. The older hunters recognize his position and so permit him to assume such privileges as riding the "one-eyed mule" Katie into the hunt, and skipping school that merely teaches "what some hired pedagogue put between the covers of a book." The values Isaac learns from Sam Fathers are grounded in respect for nature and wildlife, and in the development of man's right relationship to the natural world. He is not there to return to some primitive brutality, but to learn "humility" and "patience." As a child too young to go on the hunt, Isaac "would watch the wagon … depart for the Big Bottom" not even expecting the hunters to return with a trophy. To him, they were going not to hunt bear and deer but to keep a yearly rendezvous with the bear which they did not even intend to kill. The hunt is more of a "yearly pageant-rite" that enables the hunters to renew their perspectives. When Isaac finally enters the wilderness, he joins a race that is "dwarfed … into an almost ridiculous diminishment" by the sheer size and indifference of nature.

By the last section of "The Bear," civilization is bringing the end of the wilderness at a more rapid rate. A "lumber company [has] moved in and [begun] to cut the timber." Isaac's mentor, Sam Fathers, has died and Major de Spain, we learn, never returns to the camp. The last hunt in the story is the actual last hunt for General Compson. When Isaac arrives for the hunt, he is "shocked and grieved" at the sight of "a new planing-mill" cutting miles into the woods. Even more insidious is the threat of the locomotive, once "harmless" and "carrying to no destination or purpose sticks which left nowhere any scar…. But it was different now….this time it was as though the train … had brought with it into the doomed wilderness even before the actual axe the shadow and portent of the new mill not even finished yet and the rails and ties which were not even laid." The locomotive reveals its true power in the speed with which it can permit deforestation.

"The Bear" completes the apocalypse of the wilderness in the "civilized" intrusion of Boon Hogganbeck banging on the pieces of his faulty gun and greedily yelling, "They're mine!" The deaths of Sam and Old Ben signal the end of the wilderness, and Hogganbeck's civilization of machinery and greed that replaces it will be a poor substitute. The scope of this story depicts the broad cycle of decline, and with its primary position in the work firmly sets the tone of despair.

"The Old People" returns to the moment in section two of "The Bear" which mentions that Isaac has already "killed his buck," and fills in the entire episode. This story perpetuates the ritual of initiation, and reveals the origin of the ritual saluting of wild game that appears in "The Bear." Even this tale, however, which goes back in time, preaches the end through the genealogies of Isaac and Sam Fathers—the two of them are the last of their lines. Isaac has no descendants, and Sam's blood is "now drawing toward the end of its alien and irrevocable course." Sam's genealogy begins with the story of his father, a Chicksaw appropriately named Doom, a phonetic perversion of the French "Du Homme" that tragically foretells the future of his people. The genealogy also includes his "quadroon slave" mother, and suggests that African-Americans are always already defeated by the history of enslavement in their blood, and that this defeat is visible, at times, in Sam's eyes, reflecting a "knowledge that for a while that part of his blood had been the blood of slaves." Thus, the idea of the doomed environment, including the doomed races, is seen to have existed at least since Isaac was about ten. By returning to events before those in "The Bear," Faulkner predicts and fulfills the decline evidenced in it.

The last two stories propel us more than forty years into the future, when Ike is one of the older experienced hunters. Instead of predicting the doom of the wilderness, these stories illustrate its decline. "A Bear Hunt" is not a tale about a bear hunt, although the narrator tells us incidentally that "‘two days before Major had killed a bear.’" The hunt itself is no longer of central importance to the hunters; the ritual of going to the hunting camp and telling stories replaces it. The "participants" of this hunt, with the exception of Uncle Ike, are descendants of the hunting party of "The Bear." Luke Hogganbeck is the forty-year-old son of Boon; the Major is Major de Spain's son (the title is honorary); Ash is the son of Ash Wylie. These "hunters" have gathered at the camp for their annual ritual, but Luke's continuous hiccuping interrupts their supposed hunt. Luke "has acquired his hiccups by overeating, a fact indicative of his lessened stature" (Ragan, p. 312). Unlike the hunters of old, these men exploit the wildlife by killing more than they need. Luke is stuffed with "venison … coons and squirls … bear meat and whisky."

That storytelling assumes a greater role than the hunt is evidence by the use of two narrators. Faulkner divides "A Bear Hunt" into two sections; the first is "narrated apparently by Quentin Compson" (Ragan, p. 312) and introduces the second narrator, V.K. Ratliff. The two narrations signal in their own ways the changes in the Big Woods. Quentin notes that Ratliff now "uses model T Ford" instead of the "light, strong buckboard" of the past. And it is this first narration that gives the genealogies of the hunting-party members, that provides a sense of continuity while at the same time reminding readers that these are not the same men. Ratliff's story is a rousing one full of burlesque antics, but in the context of Big Woods, the absence of the hunt itself is ominous. Ragan notes that the characters display a "selfishness" that "underlines what the loss of the wilderness … really means. (p. 312). They are more interested in playing tricks, the effectiveness of which depends on superstition instead of on knowledge of the wilderness.

Glen M. Johnson points out that "the structure of Big Woods literally surrounds … hope with … despair," and sees "Race at Morning" as a story of hope. There is an actual hunt in this story, with the twist Johnson notes that the hunters do not kill any game but only chase it, and the lesson is one that moves "toward life." (pp. 257, 250). But, to believe that, one must believe that life is in civilization and that it can teach the same lessons and values that the wilderness previously taught, that civilization will teach the "business of mankind." This shift of focus away from the wilderness represents a clear departure from "The Bear." The business of mankind in "Race At Morning" is reading and writing, and knowing not just "what's right and what's wrong" but "why it's right and why it's wrong." In "The Bear," the hunters put little hope in "what some hired pedagogue put between the covers of a book" when regarding Ike's education. So, in this story there is no still, quiet hunting as when Sam led young Ike on his hunts, and there are no ritual salutes. There is a fast and frantic chase on horseback, in which the main hunter, Mr. Ernest, relies on the horse and the dogs and a boy to hear the dogs. Although Mr. Ernest is a skilled hunter, there is little need for him to rely on his skills in this situation. What is the boy learning as Mr. Ernest's ears? Certainly not the lessons Ike learned: patience, respect for the life taken, man's relationship to nature. Mr. Ernest would save the buck for next year's hunt rather than have "half his meat in a pickup truck." The loss of space and game in the dwindling wilderness forces the hunters to replace the hunt with a race; the hunters are wise enough to see that it is an activity empty of life-lessons.

The four rifled stories complete a circle of "a boy's education in the wilderness" (Ragan, p. 314). They also show that with the decline of the wilderness, civilization becomes the focus of man's attention. Mister Ernest encourages the unnamed boy of "Race at Morning" to turn toward civilization and away from the Big Woods, which are physically and spiritually diminished. Despite Johnson's and Ragan's persuasive readings of hope, the stories clearly predict the apocalypse of the wilderness—no matter what avenues Faulkner leaves open for the human characters….

Source: Barbara L. Pittman, "Faulkner's Big Woods and the Historical Necessity of Revision," in Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 3, Summer 1996, pp. 475-97.

David Paul Ragan

In the following excerpt, Ragan examines the revisions Faulkner made to the story "Race at Morning" between its initial publication in The Saturday Evening Post and its subsequent inclusion in Big Woods, concluding that the changes make the story more symbolic, "add to the humor," and "emphasize the beauty of the wilderness."

Despite the fact that it has been largely ignored by students of his work, Faulkner's Big Woods extended the author's lifelong habit of not repeating himself and of providing new challenges for his readers. Following his practice in novels such as The Unvanquished, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses, which incorporated previously published short stories, Faulkner drew together materials which had appeared as early as 1930 for this collection of hunting stories. And though he departed from that earlier practice as well—typically in Big Woods he limited the implications of the material, shortened and condensed, rather than enlarging and expanding, as he had usually done for earlier works—Faulkner obviously considered the volume a serious artistic project, one in which he advanced some of the most important and moving themes he dealt with in the final decade of his career.

When the collection appeared in October 1955, most reviewers criticized it as a lesser effort, one which lacked the power and range of earlier Faulkner works from which parts of it were drawn. As Malcolm Cowley put it, its strengths had "been achieved too much at the cost of other books from which the material was taken by right of eminent domain." Other reviewers labelled the volume a mismatched group of previously published selections designed only to make money. Even so perceptive a critic as Warren Beck suggested that "a fragmented and even denatured Faulkner is being peddled." Such comments fail to consider the author's craftsmanship, signalled in the fact that much of the material, such as the prose introductions to several of the stories, was almost completely rewritten. And even when a piece was incorporated essentially unchanged, its context within the new volume forces the reader to interpret it differently, for he finds his expectations significantly altered by the surrounding material. The collection consists of four hunting stories: "The Bear," "The Old People," "A Bear Hunt," and "Race at Morning," all previously published. A narrative selection serves as a prelude to the entire book, and another one serves as a sort of postlude, or epilogue; other passages provide transitional links or interludes between the stories. Each of these pieces was drawn from work already published, but each has been carefully adapted for its thematic and structural purpose within the collection.

That Faulkner took the project seriously is indicated by the changes he made in the material. With the exception of "The Old People," each of the four stories comprising the volume has been revised: "The Bear," as Faulkner explained at the University of Virginia, appears in its story version without section 4; changes in "A Bear Hunt" and "Race at Morning" help to bring them into greater conformity with other stories in the collection by altering characters, chronology, and emphasis. Even the function of "The Old People" is very much different since it follows "The Bear" in Big Woods, instead of preceding it as in Go Down, Moses.

The author's concern with the artistic integrity of the book is even more evident in the careful orchestration of the prologue, the interludes between the stories, and the epilogue. In an interview with Harvey Breit before the publication of Big Woods, Faulkner referred to these "remarks" which he had written for the stories as "interrupted catalysts." Though this term is quite possibly only the result of Faulkner's disagreement when Breit inquired if they were "commentaries" on the stories, his statements emphasize the extent to which he conceived of these sections as independent of their sources. The reader already acquainted with Faulkner's fiction will quickly recognize that they have been extensively revised from their original forms. Within the context of Big Woods, such alterations are completely justified, and criticism that the extractions violate the original versions fails to comprehend their function within the collection. They provide transitions between the stories, set the tone for each individual piece, underline themes of the collection as a whole, and create a sense of progression in both space and time. These special purposes are indicated by the fact that all the passages are printed in italics on unnumbered pages; the fact that their right margins are not justified gives them, as Glen Johnson has suggested, the appearance of blank verse.

The great interest Faulkner took in the preparation of Big Woods is also clearly demonstrated in his concern over the "decorations," pen-and-ink drawings by Edward Shenton, who had provided the illustrations for The Unvanquished. In an unsigned letter to his editor, Saxe Commins, in February 1955, Faulkner made careful suggestions about the dummy prepared by Shenton. The letter implies detailed prior discussions with the artist about the nature of the illustrations. Although Faulkner requested certain alterations, the letter reveals that he was generally delighted with Shenton's work. The importance of the drawings to the total design of the book is expressed in Faulkner's comments about the sketch of Isaac and Sam saluting the buck, intended to precede "The Old People":

The drawing is splendid. To Mr Shenton: would you risk suggesting Sam Fathers is an Indian to this extent? He is bare-headed, his hair a little long, a narrow band of cloth bound or twisted around his head? or maybe definitely long hair showing below a battered hat? Since you are not illustrating, but illuminating (in the old sense) you could have any liberty you like.

In a closing addition to the letter, possibly written the following day, Faulkner reconsidered some of his suggestions and decided that "Mr Shenton is doing so well, I am extremely timid about getting in the way." The final drawings conform closely to Faulkner's suggestions and play an important role in the book's celebration of the wilderness and the hunt.

Clearly, then, Faulkner approached the task of assembling Big Woods with a dedicated craftsmanship similar to that he had employed throughout his career. By examining each section individually, we can appreciate both the extent of his imaginative commitment and the measure of his success….

This emphasis upon life looks forward to the themes of the final story in Big Woods, "Race at Morning." Like "A Bear Hunt," the story is set in modern times, but both the humor and the themes are of another order entirely. Unlike the preceding tale, "Race at Morning" describes a genuine hunt for game. Yet the chase is different from that depicted in "The Bear" as well. A clue to this difference is provided in the interlude which introduces it; the goal of the hunt is now "not to slay the game but to pursue it, touch and let go, never satiety." Although the chase itself is comic, it is heightened by powerful description of the beauty of the woods and the nobility of the deer, magnifying the tragedy inherent in their destruction for selfish economic gain.

Most of the additions Faulkner made to "Race at Morning" serve one of three functions: they place the action on amore symbolic level; they add to the humor; they emphasize the beauty of the wilderness. The longest addition concerns the horse, Dan, which becomes a beast of almost mythical ability, linking him with both Lion and Old Ben. Another added passage describes the deer himself in supernatural terms, "like that old son of a gun actually was a hant, like Simon and the other field hands said he was," reminding the reader of the tremendous buck at the end of "The Old People." The descriptions which Faulkner included as part of the narrator's perception are also reminiscent of Isaac's reverent attitude toward the Big Woods; the boy describes the sun as "bright and strong and level through the woods, shining and sparkling like a rainbow on the frosted leaves." Such additions place "Race at Morning," like the first two stories in the book, on the level of symbolic ritual.

Other parallels between "The Old People" and "Race at Morning" point toward the latter's purpose in the collection. Like the earlier story, "Race at Morning" concerns a boy's education in the wilderness; and once again the significance of his experience is verbalized by an older man, in this case Mister Ernest. Further, the lesson itself has close ties with Cass's speech concerning the value of life. The event under consideration is Mister Ernest's allowing the great buck to go free after he and the boy had chased it all day. When the narrator confronts him about it, Mister Ernest explains his reasons: "‘Which would you rather have? His bloody head and hide on the kitchen floor yonder and half his meat in a pickup truck on the way to Yoknapatawpha County, or him with his head and hide and meat still together over yonder in that brake, waiting for next November for us to run him again?’" The significance of the hunt has been altered in light of changes in the environment. A similar alteration is required on a larger scale, as Mister Ernest had stated earlier; when the boy declares that he would be a hunter and farmer too, Mister Ernest says:

"That ain't enough any more. Time was when all a man had to do was just farm eleven and a half months, and hunt the other half. But not now. Now just to belong to the farming business and the hunting business ain't enough. You got to belong to the business of mankind."

This statement, appearing near the end of the final story in Big Woods, is central to understanding the themes of the book as a whole. It condemns those who destroy the land, the wilderness, for their own profit, but it also condemns those like Isaac McCaslin, who wish to keep the land intact for equally selfish reasons. Both ignore the "business of mankind" for more limited interests; both disregard responsibilities to the larger human community….

Source: David Paul Ragan, "‘Belonging to the Business of Mankind’: The Achievement of Faulkner's Big Woods," in Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 3, Summer 1983, pp. 301-17.

Charles S. Aiken

In the following excerpt, geographer Aiken provides a detailed description of the geography of Faulkner's mythic Yoknapatawpha County, the setting of "Race at Morning."

William Faulkner (1897-1962), an outstanding twentieth-century American author, was a prolific writer who explored unique styles and literary devices. He set the best of his novels and short stories in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, which has become one of the famous fictional places in literature. Beginning with "Sartoris" in 1929 and ending with "The Reivers" in 1962, bit by bit, Faulkner unfolded so much concerning the people, the history, and the geography of Yoknapatawpha with such consistency that to many readers it seems to be an actual county. Robert Penn Warren has observed that geography is "scrupulously though effortlessly presented in Faulkner's work," and its "significance for his work is very great."

Faulkner's prominence has resulted in a voluminous outpouring of criticism, none of which has been produced by geographers despite a growing awareness by them that fiction profoundly influences the images that people hold concerning places. This lack of evaluation is even more curious in light of the author's overt sense of geography. But lack of criticism of Faulkner's works by geographers has not resulted in lack of geographical evaluation. For more than two decades literary critics have written about the parallels between fictional Yoknapatawpha and real Lafayette County, Mississippi, and they have produced some material concerning Faulkner's geography. Many aspects, however, have not previously been considered, and the process by which he converted geographical fact into fiction has not until now been synthesized. The following assessment, in part, incorporates recognized aspects of his use of geographical reality. In part, it goes beyond into the unrecorded, legendary history and the minute, ordinary geography of northern Mississippi, Faulkner's obscure source material which only a few persons can invoke.

FACT, BASIS OF FICTION

Vital to interpretation of much of Faulkner's work is the realization that he was raised in an atmosphere in which the past was considered a better time than the present. Faulkner was born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, but in 1902 his family moved to Oxford, political seat of Lafayette County, where he lived almost all the remainder of his life. Oxford was less than seventy years old in 1902, but, like a person whose difficult life has accelerated the aging process, so the tragedies of the Civil War and Reconstruction had made history seem ancient. The poverty of the postwar period contributed to the development of a backward-looking people who, by the turn of the century, had begun to romanticize both the antebellum era and the war itself….

Throughout his fiction Faulkner leaves no doubt as to the exact location of Yoknapatawpha County. Like Lafayette, it is in the loess region of northwestern Mississippi east of the Yazoo Delta and approximately eighty miles south of Memphis. The most vivid description of the small-scale geographical context of the county is in "Intruder in the Dust" where, from a vantage point at the eastern edge of Yoknapatawpha, Charles Mallison sees

his whole native land, his home … unfolding beneath him like a map in one slow soundless explosion: to the east ridge on green ridge tumbling away toward Alabama and to the west and south the checkered fields and the woods flowing on into the blue and gauzed horizon beyond which lay at last like a cloud the long wall of the levee and the great River itself flowing not merely from the north but out of the North.

The setting of Yoknapatawpha is accurate even to concepts of perception. In "The Hamlet" the Pine Hills are characterized as "a region which topographically was the final blue and dying echo of the Appalachian mountains." Of course, Lafayette County is on the coastal plain, far removed from the Appalachian Highlands. Superficially, it appears that Faulkner is attempting to conceal the location of his county by such a statement or has simply found "dying echo of the Appalachian mountains" a pleasing phrase. Actually he is merely reiterating a commonly held belief in northern Mississippi—that the prominent hills are the end-remnants of Appalachia….

Today, people who visit Oxford and Lafayette County to experience the flavor of Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County are probably disappointed. During the past twenty-five years sweeping social, economic, and spatial changes have come to Mississippi and the entire South. Much of the basic geographical framework of the Lafayette County that Faulkner knew, including some roads and place names, remains, but almost all of the color of his time is gone. Forests dominate the landscape that as recently as 1950 was pasture and cropland. Cotton remains important, but machines have replaced the legions of mules and humans that once toiled in the fields from sunup to sundown from April through October.

Oxford is now a progressive small city of 12,000, not the agricultural town that Faulkner knew. Tobacco-chewing farmers in bib overalls no longer flock to the square on Saturdays, and with them have vanished the dust-covered wagons and pickup trucks loaded with watermelons parked around the courthouse on hot summer days. Most of the stores on the square that served an agrarian society are gone, replaced by businesses that cater to an Ole Miss student population that, since 1940, has grown from 1,400 to almost 10,000. Faulkner's characters would have difficulty moving among businesses that include the New World Bicycle Shop, the New Orleans Oyster Bar, and Good Earth Natural Foods. The courthouse remains largely unchanged, from the peeling white paint on the exterior to the musty land records vault in the Chancery Clerk's office, but the old jail was razed and replaced by a modern one in the early 1960's. Because of a recent attitude toward preservation among Oxford's leaders, there is little danger that the courthouse will be destroyed. With the university, with new shopping centers, and with proximity to Sardis Lake and metropolitan Memphis, Oxford has the potential to become the type of rural city that many Americans of the 1970's perceive as ideal.

To the visitor, almost nothing indicates that Oxford-Lafayette County was the home of William Faulkner. Even after he won the 1949 Nobel Prize for literature, Faulkner continued to live simply among his fellow Mississippians. A decade and a half after his death, no signs advertise New Albany as the birthplace of William Faulkner or Oxford as the home of a noted writer. The historical marker for Saint Peter's Cemetery indicates that it is the burial place of Supreme Court Justice L. Q. C. Lamar and other prominent early settlers, but the location of Faulkner's simple monument is unknown to all but local people. Faulkner's home, Rowan Oak, is now owned by the university and, still secluded from the street, is maintained much as he left it.

Although many residents of Oxford largely ignored Faulkner during his lifetime, today they freely discuss him and pride themselves in having known the eccentric man some once called "Curious Bill." A few have even read his books. Among the factors in this new openness are the widespread changes that have come to Mississippi in a short time. Faulkner and his world, with many of its peculiar characters burlesqued from reality, belong to the past. A person who may recognize in Faulkner's works himself or members of his family as models can rationally dissociate himself from such characters. Also, the saga of Temple Drake and other Faulkner episodes that shocked and outraged Mississippians several decades ago seem bland in a more permissive age.

As the years pass the historical Oxford-Lafayette County and Jefferson-Yoknapatawpha County will gradually blend and become one. This process, the exact reverse of what Faulkner performed, is a prime example of how the fictional becomes the real. Faulkner buffs, both local and foreign, scout Oxford and the countryside in increasing numbers, trying to identify sites and buildings. Approximately 15,000 of the people who visit Oxford each year are drawn by Faulkner, and entrepreneurs are beginning to realize that the tourist potential is much greater. One factor in Oxford's movement to preserve buildings is recognition of their relationship to Jefferson. In the not-too-distant future, transformation of Jefferson-Yoknapatawpha County into the historic Oxford-Lafayette County will be accelerated by commercialization of Faulkner. If this sad time does come, then one will be able to lodge at the Holston House, eat at the Blue Goose Cafe, and tour the rebuilt jail. On a grander scale I can envision on the outskirts of the city recreations of the McCaslin Plantation and Varner's Crossroads complete to its Littlejohn's Hotel.

Faulkner, a private person, would have cringed at carnal establishment and commercial exploitation of his world, because he believed there is a better way for it to live. He thought that a primary goal for any artist is "to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again." Faulkner is dead and the reality from which he created the fictional world of Yoknapatawpha County has all but vanished. But that world, almost as complete as any fictional place can be, from its origin in "Sartoris" to the final, romantic backward glance in "The Reivers," comes to life—with a bittersweet fragrance of nostalgia that stimulates no desire to return in those who intimately knew the reality—each time Faulkner is read.

Source: Charles S. Aiken, "Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County: Geographical Fact into Fiction," in Geographical Review, Vol. 67, No. 1, January 1977, pp. 1-21.

SOURCES

Faulkner, William, "Race at Morning," in Selected Short Stories of William Faulkner, Random House, 1970, pp. 285-306.

Ferguson, James, "The Theme of Solipsism," in Faulkner's Short Fiction, University of Tennessee Press, 1991, pp. 50-83.

Gannett, Lewis, "Big Woods," in William Faulkner: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by M. Thomas Inge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 421-23; originally published in New York Herald Tribune, October 14, 1955.

Padgett, John B., "William Faulkner," in the Mississippi Writers Page, http://www.olemiss.edu/mwp/dir/faulkner_william/index.html (accessed May 7, 2008).

Pittman, Barbara L., "Faulkner's Big Woods and the Historical Necessity of Revision," in Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. 49, No. 3, Summer 1996, p. 475.

Rosenberger, Coleman, "Four Faulkner Hunting Stories, Rich in Narrative and Symbol," in William Faulkner: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by M. Thomas Inge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 423-24; originally published in the New York Herald Tribune, October 16, 1955.

Skei, Hans H., "William Faulkner," in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 102, American Short-Story Writers, 1910-1945, Second Series, edited by Bobby Ellen Kimbel, Gale Research, 1991, pp. 75-102.

U.S. Census Bureau, Educational Attainment: 2000, http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-24.pdf (accessed May 7, 2008).

U.S. Census Bureau, "Illiteracy of Persons 14 Years Old and Over, by Color and Sex, by Age, Residence, and Region, for the United States: Civilian Noninstitutional Population, March 1959," http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/education/p20-099/tab-06.pdf (accessed May 7, 2008).

Wright, David, "Blood Sports," in Booklist, Vol. 101, No. 1, September 1, 2004, p. 52.

FURTHER READING

Bryant, J. A., Jr., Twentieth-Century Southern Literature, University Press of Kentucky, 1997.

Bryant's academic overview of southern literature is an informative mix of history and literary criticism. The fourth and sixth chapters of the book are largely devoted to Faulkner and his work.

Morris, Willie, Faulkner's Mississippi, photographs by William Eggleston, Oxmoor House, 1990.

This collection of Faulkner's writing, complemented by photographs of Mississippi and Morris's commentary, sheds further insight on the areas upon which Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County is based.

Parini, Jay, One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner, HarperCollins, 2004.

The novelist and critic Parini presents a literary biography that traces Faulkner's life and work in an attempt to draw connections between the two. The book is based upon Faulkner's memoirs and letters as well as on interviews with the people who knew him.

Williams, Juan, Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965, introduction by Julian Bond, Viking, 1987.

This volume traces the history surrounding the civil rights movement, to which "Race at Morning" briefly alludes.