Is pantaloon in black a tragedy?

Answer 1

"Is 'Pantaloon in Black' a tragedy" is a very good question. I have not considered it but my initial reaction is that it does fit Aristotle's definition in a charitable way. I will not go into a scholarly exegesis of the piece and why it might be considered a tragedy, but I would like to attempt to answer the question quickly and raise another question.

I must explain first that when I stumbled on the story I was amazed at its perfection and mad that no one had ever even mentioned it to me. For years I would ask scholars who were personal friends of mine, people like Andrew Lytle and Katherine Anne Porter, what they thought of the story, and to a person they all said almost exactly the same thing; to wit, that it was the best thing Faulkner ever wrote.

That Rider is of a noble house is problematic, but in his own way he looms large both in stature and character and certainly came from "noble" stock. That he has a flaw is the crux of the story and the thing that gives the story a unity of action. Aristotle says that what gives a story unity is not that it is about one person but that it is about one action. In the case of "Pantaloon in Black" that action is love and the tragic flaw is that Rider has an excess of it--if that is possible. His wife Manny has died and Rider is so grief struck that from the first action of the story to the last everything he does is an attempt to get himself killed. The problem is that he is too healthy, too big and strong. Not anger, alcohol, logs, or ghosts or all the other things he tries will kill him until at last he does the one thing that surely will bring about his downfall--slice a white man in a gambling game. However, even that results only in his being thrown in a jail cell so that he has to call on his super-human strength to break out and inevitably get tracked down by a mob and lynched. That these actions arouse pity and fear and end in a katharsis is indisputable. Poor Rider, the black fool for love.

The question I would like to raise concerns part two of the piece. As wonderful as it is, isn't the story over at the end of part one? Isn't part two an entirely different story, albeit a kind of Greek choral commentary? Is part two another example of Faulkner's penchant for adding one final set of actions that are great in their own right but formally not a part of the main actions proper, the story that precedes them?

--F. Armstrong Green 10/08/08