e reader as one which will end in violence, probably violence involving the protagonist.
In fact, violence does take place, but the violence is of a non-physical nature. Yes, a deer is hot, but the shooting does not involve the protagonist. That shooting is used as a metaphor itself by Faulkner to illustrate the vulnerability not of a deer but of a human being, or two human beings.
The violence at the heart of the story is the violence done to Ike by the changes which he has experienced and is still experiencing. Nothing is the same as it was. Nature is being pillaged by man and man's relentless civilization. The traditional values of the past are being bulldozed away just as those traditional values are being bulldozed away. Things are not the same and they will never be the same way again, thinks Ike, but this does not mean that he has let go of his dream of the past.
To the contrary, one of the major aspects of the structure of the story in terms of Ike's character development, or change at least, if not development, is the long establishment of Ike as a man of high ideals and principles, followed by the sudden exclamation he makes to the woman:
Now he understood what it was she had brought into the tent with her, what old Isham had already told him by sending the youth to bring her in to him--the pale lips, the skin pallid and dead-looking yet not ill, the dark and tragic and foreknowing eyes. Maybe in a thousand or two thousand years in America, he thought. But not now! Not now! He cried, not loud, in a voice of amazement, pity and outrage: "You're a nigger!" (Faulkner 658).
The violence of this word in the context of the portrait of Ike which has been established is shocking. He has been shown to be a man who believes in ideals, tradition, principles, high moral standards, etc., but with that one word, spoken aloud and meant to be violent and shocking, the worst of Ike is revealed suddenly and terribly.
H...