Nearly thirty years ago, in The Achievement of William Faulkner, Michael Millgate argued that the aesthetic unity of Go Down, Moses resulted from Faulkner's successful representation of “the white-Negro theme.” Like other literary formalists of his generation, Millgate focused on a “theme” notable for its tension and conflict, in order to show how the literary work effects “the conjunction, and in some measure the fusion, of a number of disparate ideas” (201). For Millgate, this aesthetic synthesis depends crucially on the character of Ike McCaslin, “whose combination of sensitivity and long life would afford scope for the two complementary strategies of innocent childhood and retrospective old age” (201). More than simply anchoring the thematic tensions of Go Down, Moses, Ike embodies them in a complex character that serves as an ironic patriarch for a new, redeemed South. Ike may never “father” the “new family” that would transform the conflicts of Southern whites and African Americans into an openly miscegenated family, but this is surely what Faulkner claims for himself as author in dramatizing the twinned fates of the whites and African Americans of the McCaslin family as the central action of Go Down, Moses.