The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

In "Delta Autumn" and again in the chapter with that title in Go Down, Moses, there are two groups of hunters. This group consists of the the men with whom Ike McCaslin hunted in the past, when game was still plentiful in Yoknapatawpha. Ike can remember how they "shot wild turkey with pistols to test their stalking skills and marksmanship, feeding all but the breast to the dogs" (267, 319). Some of these men are the fathers and grandfathers of young men in the story's present-day hunting party.

Isaac (Ike) McCaslin became one of Faulkner's best-known protagonists in "The Bear." In this magazine version of "Delta Autumn," he is mainly identified simply as "McCaslin" (268), and several times as "Uncle Ike" (267, 275). The complex family history that Faulkner gives him in Go Down, Moses is barely hinted at here. The story refers to his "father" as a Confederate soldier (273), and to his "wife and children" (274), all now dead.

John Keats, the author of the poem the boy's father reads him at the end of the story, was one of the principal figures of the second generation of British Romantics. Unlike the most prominent of his contemporaries, Keats was born of humble origins. He died of tuberculosis at the young age of twenty-five, at which time he had only been a published poet for five years.