Our own reflections are the hardest to confront

    Perhaps the sight that one has the most difficult time with recognizing is the true reflection of oneself; as human decency often forbids one from staring too deeply into one's own soul. If this is true, then it wouldn't be too strange that we all seek subconsciously to escape ourselves, or at least to flee from what we think defines our very own essence. 

    For Isaac, that exit from his human responsibilities comes in the form of nature and all the beauty and nourishment that she has to freely offer. With Sam Fathers as a guide and mentor, the younger Isaac was able to seclude himself in the woods amidst nature, and keep the knowledge of the affairs on the plantation at bay. Even in his adult life, Isaac chose to live with his assumedly miserable wife far away from civilization and society in order to stay close to his natural sanctuary, without seeing or realizing what effects his abandonment of his expected role in the world could have upon those close to him. 

    By the events of Delta Autumn, the understanding that reality is becoming harder and harder to escape was mirrored by mankind's unending desecration of Isaac's sacred refugee, a notion that must have been impossibly difficult for the old man to get accustomed to. The foreboding coming of the "messenger" highlights the fear that men have in facing reality, as the idea of having to look in to the eyes of the half-image of himself literally made Roth Edmonds flee the scene. 

    Isaac, too, was not immune to the sight, but when left alone to confront with his family's misgivings, his reaction culminated in something far sadder than Roth's simple irresponsibility. 

"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 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!' " (Delta Autumn)

    Through their interaction it becomes clear that Isaac does not despise the mother of Roth's child for who she is, but rather he is pitied by her "dark and tragic and foreknowing eyes" and despises himself, for he knows that the South he lived and grew up in will not in a millennia tolerate this pity. After trying to hide and escape from racism and hatred for his whole life, Ike is faced with the reality of it all, and by calling his own kin such a degrading term, Isaac has made the tragic self-affirmation that he for his entire life had tried to avoid. By the last years of his life, the man who is "uncle to half a country and father to no one" had become a hollowed, empty shell of that young man who had once adventurously crept through his own woods in search of worthy prey, who loved the land and her fruits. All that is left for him is a bitterness at the future, "No wonder the ruined woods I used to know don't cry for retribution! he thought: The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge".

    At the end, it seems that Boon Hogganbeck, for all of his strangeness and courage, had been all along a parody of Isaac's much more tragic life; for the former, though a little unhinged, still has his trees full of squirrels to hunt, while all that awaited Old Ike was the defiled carcass of a doe.