Thus, with(out) a kiss, Rider dies

   Wow! For the first time, I throughly, and without confusion or doubt, enjoyed one of Faulkner's works. It honestly mesmerized me. That's the only word for it: mesmerized.
    I'm thinking when I'm older I will appreciate Faulkner's works more, but I can honestly say that the age and mentality I have right now fully appreciates "Pantaloon In Black."
   The first thing that surprised me was the narrator - a strong, black, male. He was intelligent, willful, and, most importantly, he had a full range of emotions. He was deep. He felt a grief that some people in reality cannot feel or even begin to comprehend.
   Faulkner's black characters are so rarely empowering. They have a limited range of emotions/intelligence/personality. They either idolize a white person/family like Wash Jones and Dilsey or they are entirely focused on a single aspect like Clytie or Dilsey's sons. But Rider is wholly different. He seems more human than the stunted black characters before. He works hard for what he wants. He takes care of his family. He doesn't have some huge, fatal flaw (until Mannie dies that is). He feels love, happiness, regret, and grief.  He is a very round character. I would venture to say that even when he is spiraling towards his end and going crazy in the end, he is still a round character due to the huge range of emotion he has.
   And I would like to take a stab at the idea that he could not express his grief properly. I think that what Faulkner was trying to get with the self-destruction, was not that he couldn't deal with the grief but that his love for Mannie was so great, so infinite and consuming, that there was literally no life without her. Rider says that he had to make up reasons to keep breathing, because without Mannie in his life there is nothing, there is no will to live or even a true reason to. It is only his body's unwillingness to die that is keeping him from her.
   This love astounds me. It astounds me because I really did not see Faulkner writing about such a mythical and noble love. Most of the love relationships that his characters have are stunted and deformed. There is incestuous love, disillusioned sibling love, hate-love, I-have-to-get-married-so-it-might-as-well-be-this-person love. But nothing like this. The mythic/greek aspect is always there in his writing but like I said in class, this reminds me more of a Romeo-Juliet type thing.
   It has Faulkner's beautiful writing and his characteristic self-hate/self-destruction, but the love aspect seems so foreign to his writing. Maybe I'm just not well read enough? I don't know, but it really surprised me, and as you can tell I really liked this story.