“As Out of a Seer’s Crystal Ball”: The Racialized Gaze in William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust

Abstract

[Faulkners] awareness of an educated black readership ... is encoded in the portrayal of black characters throughout Go Down, Moses; Intruder in the Dust; and Requiem for a Nun. ... [T]he stories convey more of a sense of the whites being watched and judged and manipulated by the black characters. The black characters withhold speech from the whites even as they claim agency and in various ways seek to manipulate or defeat the whites who subordinate, dominate, or oppose them