the known world.

In the passage of The Known World by Edward P. Jones, the character of Moses as a man who frees himself from slavery, true to his namesake, is established through key stylistic choices and selective shows of the man's true character in writing. By doing so the way Jones has chosen to do so, Moses comes across as a complex man struggling with his ownership over himself, and that which is now 'his', and the way his connection to both the earth and the people around him allow for bits of his true character to come out.

A man of solitude, Moses, who is proclaimed solely by the fact that he smiles only when he believes himself to be alone, when he can accept that a kind of loneliness is about him in the field ---- "Believing he was alone, he smiled." ---- a reason for this being that his thoughts work themselves more easily through his head when he is by himself, something that his own family happens to know, if the line, "His wife knew enough now not to wait for him to come and eat with them." is anything to go by. While alone, he loses himself in the sensory details of the night, or the lack of senses thereof, as he goes through a brief auditory hallucination near the end of the passage, which happens to be a symptom of sensory deprivation. He lays down in the grass, the dirt which he had tasted, and lets the rain fall on him until he falls asleep, where he then awakes covered in dew.

In many ways, one can perceive that Moses is a man of the earth; he takes the earth into himself, and perceives the changes of the world through the taste of it ---- working the dirt between the wedges of his teeth, and deciding the changes of the season and the field, whether it can bear a good crop or not. He associates the taste of dirt with previous relationships, "... a sour moldiness he associated with the coming of fall and winter, the end of a relationship he had begun with the first taste of dirt back in March." with something that isn't so much related to the world and the earth and its dirt, but instead to his own humanity.

Despite his humanity, he doesn't speak fondly of those trapped in bondage. Oddly enough, for someone named after the same man from Bible mythos, who freed the Hebrews and drew them across the Red Sea. The way the sentence, "... bondage women, particularly the pregnant ones, ate it for some incomprehensible need..." comes across, it seems as though he is drawing a line of delineation and differentiation between him and the women in bondage. As if to say: 'here is how we are different, and what you do is incomprehensible to me, and has no reason, unlike what I do'. Even though what he does do seems somewhat incomprehensible, particularly to any modern-day reader, who might see this through the lens of mental illness.

One realizes that this Moses is a slave, as well,"... his master." being the indication. That lends somewhat of an explanation to the shift in tone in regards to those still trapped in the bonds of slavery; his master is dead, he sees this as a freedom. He is free, now, and those who are not free are below him, beneath him. They are 'incomprehensible'. Once he lays down in the rain near the end of the passage, the dirt of his slavery is washed from him. He is baptized, made into a free man by this small world, which, "... meant almost as much as his own life."

He even knows when the rain is coming, having felt it "...surge through him." In the same sentence, he claims ownership over "...his own cabin, his woman, and his boy." With the rain comes the washing away of his slavery, and the sovereignty over things which were, originally, his master's. With that in mind, the scene comes to a close when Moses loses himself in the feel of rain, and falls asleep in it. For when he awakens, he awakens as a new man ---- as a Moses who freed himself from his own bonds, from his "...ancient and brittle harness." For even before his master's death, his master's hold on him was unsure. Ancient, and brittle, and prone to breaking.

Through these little descriptions, Edward P. Jones, like an artist, carefully lays out small brushstrokes that make up the painting of the man known as Moses, of his small struggles which he reveals through careful characterization and word choice, employing an almost lyrical choice of syntax to describe how a man washes himself of his bondage.