A Study Guide for William Faulkner's "Race at Morning"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for William Faulkner's "Race at Morning," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jul 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535831734

Book preview

09

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