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Essay / William Faulkner and his literature on the South
William Cuthbert Falkner began his life on September 25, 1897 in Mississippi. He was born into a prominent family that owned banks and a railroad. Mammy Callie, his childhood nurse, contributed greatly to his works. The stories she told him stayed with him throughout his life and even inspired some of his stories. Although his biggest influence was his great-grandfather, who everyone called the old colonel. Falkner decided at a young age that he was going to write like the old colonel. He was not a scholar however, by the fourth grade he grew tired of school and eventually dropped out of school for the second time until the eleventh grade. Falkner held numerous jobs before the publication of his first manuscript. He joined the British Royal Air Force and added a "u" to his last name, to sound more British, but he would never see a day of combat. After his unsuccessful attempt to become a pilot, he returned to Oxford and became postmaster at the University of Mississippi Post Office. When he was fired for throwing mail, he moved to New Orleans and began writing. Publishers didn't like his first book Flags in the Dust, so he edited it and renamed it Sartoris. Although he had a rocky start, his writing career quickly took off with his second book, The Sound and the Fury (Harmon). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay William Faulkner creates an entire world based on his own experiences. He writes primarily about Mississippi during its transition from the Old South, from the Civil War, to the age of industry. Early in his life, Faulkner said “he realized that he could write all his life and never completely exhaust his little postage stamp of his native land” (Ferris 6). Although he gives the fictional name Yoknapatawapha County to his main setting, it is actually based on Lafayette County where he spent most of his life. “Faulkner grew up surrounded by traditional traditions: family and regional stories, rural folk wisdom and humor, heroic and tragic tales of the War Between the States, and tales of the hunting code and the ideal of Southern gentleman conduct.” (William Faulkner). This history, coupled with his desire to be part of the modern world, creates a conflict within Faulkner that comes through in his work. As biographer Singal states: “Throughout his life, Faulkner struggled to reconcile these two divergent approaches to individuality: the Victorian urge toward individuality. the unity and stability he had inherited as a child of rural southern gentry, and the modernist drive for multiplicity and change that he absorbed early in his career as a self-identified member of the international artistic avant-garde. Faulkner needs to present the traditional people of the South using modern techniques. He achieves this goal by carefully developing his characters, and these characters are brought to life through a variety of methods. Three of the most effective techniques used by Faulkner are his ability to capture dialect and mannerisms. of his characters, his character's need to dwell on their past, and a stream of consciousness approach to much of his storytelling. The South in Faulkner's works is filled with the trappings of their time: an agricultural society, Southern belles and gentlemen, racial inequality. , and especially the rural dialect of the South. Faulkner presents a realistic portrait of the South he grew up in using samples of Southern language, including the speech ofupper and lower classes. Faulkner establishes a unique voice, recognizable by its distinct vocabulary, pronunciation, and lack of grammatical form, unique to the South. Faulkner uses this convention perfectly in “Barn Burning.” From the first time he uses the voice of Colonel Sartoris Snopes, it's clear who this kid is and his likely fate in life. By describing his father's enemy as "our!" mine and both! ("Barn" 3), many details of the boy's upbringing are brought to light through these five words. When Abner warns Sartoris that "you must learn to stick to your own blood, or you will have no blood sticking to you" ("Barn Burning" 8), Faulkner shows in a single sentence how Abner acts towards his own blood. son.Faulkner's dialect is effective both as a literary device and as a link between Southern language, culture, and history. Faulkner succeeds in representing the Southern dialect consistently throughout his stories. In his writings, this can be described by traits such as an intentional misspelling or the use of Miss with a woman's first name, such as Miss Emily. Linguists such as Raven McDavid understood that older and less educated people, as well as many blacks, in their studies of Southern languages demonstrated the use of improper past tense verbs such as div for dive, cultivated for grow and rice to rise (McDavid 264). -280). As a result, in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, there is a huge sign on the Second Black Baptist Church that reads "He Is Ris." Another feature of Faulkner's language common to Southern dialects is the occasional loss of the "r" sound, as in the words "baun" for born and "bastud" for bastard. These words, along with dozens of others appearing in many of Faulkner's stories, help solidify the speaker and dialect in the reader's mind. Faulkner's written representation of Southern speech very closely follows the actual linguistic parameters of Southern Lowland dialect, or Southern proper, by Raven McDavid's classification. Thus, his written dialogue is an accurate copy of the Southern dialect he actually speaks. Faulkner strives to show all the nuances of this dialect, even though many of them cannot really be seen through writing alone. For example, cues presented by facial and body expressions must be offset by written equivalents, such as pronunciation, grammar, and word usage. Faulkner's works also depict different perceptions of time. Many of its main characters have neither present nor future; they are caught in their own past. “As for Faulkner’s heroes, they never look ahead” (Sartre 91). One of Faulkner's most powerful disconnected characters is Joe Christmas, in Light in August. The protagonist's first description is "rootless" (Light 21), and his memories date back to when he was five years old, when he was adopted from an orphanage. He therefore has no concrete knowledge of his heritage and is going through a painful identity crisis. To his dismay, his adoptive parents, the MacEacherns, mercilessly impose zealous religious beliefs on him. Always different from the others, he becomes an outcast and is called a nigger so often that he loses all self-esteem. the abuse from his family and the racist insults from his peers mark all his memories and he cannot escape his past. Joe Christmas “is not determined by his past, he is his past” and has “no idea of his future” (Poullion Joe 83). develops negative associations towards women, because the only time he sees them is in church. He falls in love with Bobbie, the waitress, but his original distrust ofhis regard for women strengthens when he discovers that she is a prostitute. past impressions, especially childhood impressions, Faulkner shows that the present is submerged in the past, that what is experienced in the present is what was experienced in the past” (Poullion 80). Once Joe killed MacEachern, "he entered the street that had been operating for fifteen years" (Light 223). As Joe flees, he loses all sense of reality and time. “He thought it was loneliness he was trying to escape, not himself” (Light 226). For a time, he gains some stability in his relationship with Johanna Burden, and she threatens his life with religious conversion. her story and can't handle this relationship, so he kills her and runs away again. He once again loses his grip on time and reality. "He could never know when he would pass from one to the other, when he would realize that he was asleep without remembering having gone to bed, or that he would wake up without remembering having woken up " (Light 333). He doesn't think about eating or sleeping, and during two fits of madness, he even demands to know the day of the week. “It was as if now and at last he had a real and urgent need to devote the accomplished days to a goal without failing or exceeding” (Light 335). The secret of Joe's past is revealed at the end of the novel. , after being captured and accused of murder. The pieces are collected for the reader alone. It is said that he was the illegitimate son of a black circus employee and that his grandfather, Doc Hines, was the orphanage janitor. Joe never receives this crucial information, and it is only when Percy Grimm castrates and murders him that he can truly rest in peace. “Then his face, his body, everything seemed to collapse, falling in on itself and from the torn clothes around his hips and loins, the black, pent-up blood seemed to flow like released breath” (Light 465). His past is the permanent thorn in his side that prevents him from seeing his future, or even his present. In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner creates a mentally retarded character named Benjy Compson. Of the novel's four narrators, Benjy's striking observations combine to paint the most revealing picture of the Compson family. Benjy recounts major events in his life such as his name change in early childhood, the realization that he was castrated, and Caddy's transformation. His awareness of his surroundings and his aversion to change are not clear to others, as he has difficulty expressing himself. He has no sense of chronological time. His narrative is made up of jumbled memories, constantly jumping from one thought to another without any guidance. Overall, Benjy’s memories add a dreamlike dimension to the novel: “The past takes on a kind of super-reality; its contours are hard and clear, immutable” (Sartre 89). What confuses the reader does not confuse Benjy, since his entire existence is a collage of his disjointed memories. Benjy can only use his senses to register his emotions and relies primarily on his hearing and smell. Its past is “sensation” (Sartre 48). Almost instinctively, he knows when changes occur in his routine. For example, he likes the fact that his sister Caddy always smells like trees. On his wedding day, Benjy realizes, “Caddy put her arms around me, with her veil shining, and I couldn't feel the trees anymore and I started to cry” (Son 40). He knows she's leaving home and he'll be without the only person who has ever cared about his feelings. In losing his sister, he also loses the only other thing he loves, his pasture. "He was lying on the ground under the window, howling. We sold Benjy's pasture so Quentin could goat Harvard" (Sound 94). His endless continuum of memories transforms his dysfunctional family past into a prison of despair. Benjy Compson, in The Sound and the Fury, and Joe Christmas, in Light in August, are trapped in their own pasts bitter, which shows that “the story of a man “The misfortune lies in the fact that he is limited in time” (Sartre 88). Therefore, the fixation of time is omnipresent in Faulkner's works for. emphasize the grip of the past This fixation is usually associated with a completely disjointed timeline consciousness can be used to show a major aspect of a character or situation. This is the premise of "A Rose for Emily". , one of Faulkner's most widely read stories. In "A Rose for Emily," Faulkner recounts the events of Emily's life out of sequence. The order in which they remember them. Through these memories, Faulkner reveals the feelings of the city towards him. These events do not follow one another logically, the reader is kept in the dark to create suspense. Instead, the story begins at the end, with the mourners gathering at Miss Emily's house, and jumps from one time period to the next. Faulkner “juxtaposed the lives of different characters in scenes that did not unfold in a linear or chronological fashion” (McHaney 50), and this slow revelation is created to place the events in order of importance and not just in a linear fashion. . Faulkner believes that Emily's pride and presence in her dealings with the aldermen is more important than her past, which is why he recounts how she "defeated them, on horseback and on foot" (Emily 52), before to explain his past. He then goes back thirty years to better explain his influence on the community. As he tells the story of the aldermen fixing the smell at Emily's house, Faulkner slowly reveals the clues to what is the ultimate discovery. Then he reveals Homer Baron and how the town thought it would “never think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer” (Emily 55). Homer was Emily's only true suitor and had left town shortly before the scent. The final clue is revealed by his purchase of arsenic and his ability to circumvent the law to obtain it. “Miss Emily just looked at him, her head tilted back to look at him eye to eye, until he looked away and went to get the arsenic and bag it” (Emily 56). Instead of overtly stating that Homer was the reason for the smell, Faulkner introduces it to the reader, telling Homer's story after reporting on the smell. Faulkner's gradual exposition of Emily's character, through the mourner's memory, subtly foreshadows the shock. and the horror of finding the monster in the matriarch of Jefferson, Mississippi. In this way, the reader learns what the town thinks of her, before the discovery, and the feelings that allowed Emily to get away with everything she wanted for so long. The townspeople did not expect such a turn of events. Emily meant so much to the town that they could never have suspected her of anything other than eccentricity. This really shows how much their feelings for her have clouded their perception of her. By introducing the reader to the true sequence of events, Faulkner ensures that the reader sees a view that the city does not see. Although the townspeople may not expect Homer's corpse, it is expected by the reader. Although the stream of consciousness can be difficult to follow, it adds a sense of accomplishment to discovering Emily's secret before town. If Faulkner had used a linear plot in the story, a. 1969