Narrative strategies in William Faulkner’s cycle “Go down, Moses”

During the period of 1940-1960, William Faulkner’s novellas’ cycle “Go Down, Moses” has sparked an open debate among literary critics over its artistic unity. In this essay, the integrity of Faulkner’s collection “Go Down, Moses” is examined through the narratological analysis’ prism, which has not previously been applied to this cycle. The narrative strategies’ study - pictures of the world and ethoses of storytelling - demonstrates the heterogeneity of this short stories collection’s narrative structure, which, in turn, constitutes the cycle’s artistic “unpredictability” as of a major genre configuration. Thus, some of the literary pieces (“Was”, “The Fire and Hearth”, “Pantaloon in Black”, the same title novella “Go Down, Moses”) represent an adventurous picture of the world, while others - “The Old People”, “The Bear” and ‘Autumn Delta”, concentrated around Isaac McCaslin, - generate a precedental world order. The ethoses are also not the same, but they cover all four fundamental narrative’s aims, identified by V.I. Tyupa within the framework of the historical narratology’s study. In the novellas “Was,” “The Old People” and “Go Down, Moses” - an ethos of peace, in “The Fire and Hearth” and “The Bear” - an ethos of conscience, and in “Pantaloon in Black” and “Delta Autumn - ethoses of desire and debt, having a mirror symmetrical demarcation between themselves. It is expected that our study’s results can claim a clearer depiction of the cycle-forming features in “Go Down, Moses” through the narrative strategies’ analysis.