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William Faulkner "[I] discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it, and that by sublimating the actual into the apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top. It opened up a gold mine of other people, so I created a cosmos of my own. " (William Faulkner) When we think of the best American writers of the 20 -th century, the first names that come to our mind are E. Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner. Indeed, William Faulkner is a prominent figure in the world literature. He won the famous Noble Prize in literature in 1949.
He wrote novels, short stories and poems. His works were screened and he worked in Hollywood. William Faulkner used such new ways of writing as stream of conscience, long sentences, chronological disorder etc. These techniques of writing made him a famous post-modernist writer. When being in Paris and sitting next to James Joyce, a famous post-modernist writer, Faulkner was too shy to speak to him.
After The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner became a renowned post-modernist himself. In this paper we are going to analyze William Faulkner's life and the oeuvre of his post-modernism talent The Sound and the Fury. William Cuthbert Falkner (as his name was then spelled) was born on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, the first of four sons born to Murry and Maud Butler Falkner. He was named after his great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner, the Old Colonel, who had been killed eight years earlier in a duel with his former business partner in the streets of Ripley, Mississippi. A lawyer, politician, planter, businessman, Civil War colonel, railroad financier, and finally a best-selling writer (of the novel The White Rose of Memphis), the Old Colonel, even in death, was a model of personal and professional success for his male descendants. A few days before Williams fifth birthday, the Falkner's moved to Oxford, Mississippi, at the urging of Murrys father, John Wesley Thompson Falkner.
In this small town, located in one of the poorest states of the United States, grew up and spent most of his life the future author of The Sound and the Fury. William demonstrated artistic talent at a young age, drawing and writing poetry, but around the sixth grade he began to grow increasingly bored with his studies. His earliest literary efforts were romantic, modeled on English poets such as Burns, Thomson, Housman, and Swinburne. While still in his youth, he also made the acquaintance of two individuals who would play an important role in his future: a childhood sweetheart, Estelle Oldham, and a literary mentor, Phil Stone.
Williams other close acquaintance from this period arose from their mutual interest in poetry. When Stone read the young poets work, he immediately recognized Williams talent and set out to give Faulkner encouragement, advice, and models for study. He invited Faulkner to stay with him in New Haven, where Faulkner first took a job with the Winchester Repeating Arms Company (where, for the first time, his name was spelled Faulkner in employee records, possibly the result of a typing error). But his job did not last long, for in June he accepted an invitation to become a cadet in training in the Royal Air Force in Canada. Earlier, Faulkner had tried to join the U. S.
Army Air Force, but he had been turned down because of his height. In his RAF application, he lied about numerous facts, including his birth date and birthplace, in an attempt to pass himself as British. He also spelled his name Faulkner, believing it looked more British, and in meeting with RAF officials he affected a British accent. He began training in Toronto, but before he finished training, the war ended. He received an honorable discharge and bought an officers dress uniform and a set of wings for the breast pocket, even though he had probably never flown solo. Though he had seen no combat in his wartime military service, upon returning to Oxford in December 1918, he allowed others to believe he had.
He told many stories of his adventures in the RAF, most of which were highly exaggerated or untrue, including injuries that had left him in constant pain and with a silver plate in his head. As we see, William Faulkner never suffered the lack of imagination. His brief service in the RAF would also serve him in his written fiction, particularly in his first published novel, Soldiers Pay, in 1926. After the war, Faulkner came back to Oxford, enrolled as a special student at the University of Mississippi and began to write for the school papers and magazines, quickly earning a reputation as an eccentric. His strange routines, swanky dressing habits, and inability to hold down a job earned him the nickname "Count No count. " He became postmaster of the University in 1921 and resigned three years later. In 1924 his first book of poetry, The Marble Faun, was published, but it was critically panned and had few buyers.
In early 1925 Faulkner and a friend traveled to New Orleans with the intention of getting Faulkner a berth on a ship to Europe, where he planned to refine his writing skills. But instead Faulkner ended up staying in New Orleans for a few months and writing. There he met the novelist Sherwood Anderson, whose book Winesburg, Ohio was a pillar of American Modernism. His friendship with Anderson inspired him to start writing novels, and in a short time he finished his first novel, Soldier's Pay, which was published in 1926 and was critically accepted although it sold few copies.
Faulkner eventually did travel to Europe, but quickly returned to Oxford to write. Faulkner wrote four more novels between 1926 and 1931: Mosquitoes (1927), Sartorius (1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929), and As I Lay Dying (1930), but none of them sold well, and he earned little money in this period. Finally, in 1931, Sanctuary was published and became financially successful. Suddenly Faulkner's work began selling, and even magazines that had rejected his stories in the past clamored to publish them. Even Hollywood sought after him to write. Faulkner's first big purchase was a large mansion in Oxford, where he lived and wrote, gaining a reputation as a reclusive curmudgeon.
Between this time and the 1940 s, Faulkner wrote seven more novels, including his famous Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August. In 1950, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and, in typical Faulkner fashion, he sent his friends into a frenzy by refusing to attend the ceremony (although he eventually did go). In the latter part of the 1950 s, he spent some time away from Oxford, including spending a year as a writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia. He returned to Oxford in June of 1962 and died of a heart attack on the morning of July 6 of that year.
Now we are going to analyze the novel of William Faulkner in which his writing style of post-modernism showed itself best of all. The Sound and the Fury was published in 1929, although it was one of the first novels Faulkner wrote. Many critics and even Faulkner himself think that it is the best novel that he wrote. According to Faulkner, the story began with a vision of a little girl's muddy drawers as she climbed a tree to look at death while her brothers, lacking her courage, waited below: I tried first to tell it with one brother, and that wasn't enough. That was Section One. I tried it with another brother, and that wasn't enough.
That was Section Two. I tried the third brother, because Caddy was still to me too beautiful and too moving to reduce her to telling what was going on, that it would be more passionate to see her through somebody else's eyes, I thought. And that failed and I tried myself the fourth section to tell what happened, and I still failed. (Faulkner in the University, 1977) The subject of the novel is the downfall of the Compson family, the offspring of the pioneer Jason Lycurgus Compson. The family consists of Jason Compson III and his wife Caroline, their four children Jason IV, Quentin, Candace (Caddy), and Maury (whose name is changed in 1900 to Benjamin), Caroline's brother Maury Bascomb, and their family of black servants: Dilsey and Risks and their children Very, T. P. and Front.
In 1928 when the story mainly takes place, two other important characters are Quentin, Caddy's illegitimate daughter, and Luster, Front's son. The post-modernism way of writing is in how each of the first three sections of the novel is narrated by a different member of the Compson family. The first is narrated by Benjamin, the second by Quentin (Jason III's son, not Caddy's daughter), and the third by Jason IV. The fourth section is a third person narrative, although many readers see it as "narrated" by Dilsey, the Compson's old black servant.
Although narrated by the three brothers and the servant, the focus of the novel is really the sister Caddy. Each of the three brothers has a different view on Caddy and her promiscuity. To Benjy Caddy is a gentle caretaker whose absence - caused by her promiscuity and marriage - fills his adult life with a sense of loss. To Quentin Caddy's sexuality is a sign of the dissolution of the Southern world of family honor and the event that spurs him to commit suicide.
To Jason Caddy's promiscuity means the loss of a job opportunity and is the reason he is stuck at a desk job that he finds demeaning, as well as the reason he is stuck at home with a hypochondriac mother, retarded brother, rebellious illegitimate niece and family of servants who are eating him out of house and home. The last section of the novel provides a less biased view of Caddy's life and the downfall of the Compson family. Faulkner himself acknowledged the fact that the novel revolves around the absent center of Caddy and her story; he claims that the novel began as a single idea - an image of a little girl up a tree with muddy drawers - and grew into a short story entitled "Twilight. " But Faulkner loved Caddy's character so much that he developed this short story into an entire novel. The first three sections are narrated in a technique known as stream of consciousness, in which the writer takes down the character's thoughts as they occur to him, paying little attention to chronology of events or continuity of story line. The technique is the most marked in the first section, wherein Benjy's mind skips backward and forward in time as he relives events from the past while simultaneously conducting himself in the present. Quentin's section is slightly more ordered, although his agitated state of mind causes him to experience similar skips in time.
Jason's section is almost totally chronological, much more structured than the first two. In order to make reading this difficult novel easier, Faulkner at one time suggested printing it in colored ink in order to mark the different time periods, but this was too expensive. Instead, in the first section, he writes some sentences in italics in order to signal a shift in time. Even with these italics, however, the story is difficult to read. Not much happens in the three days in which the novel is mainly set; instead the stream of consciousness narration allows the reader to experience the history of the Compson family and step into the lives of this dwindling Southern family. The troubled relationships of the family are at once mundane and sweepingly tragic, pulling the reader into its downward spiral.
None of Faulkner's novels has generated as much critical response as The Sound and the Fury. Still, there are some things on which critics agree. Few dispute that the novel depicts a "tragedy, " the decline of the Compson family. There is agreement too that much of the novel is told in a stream-of-consciousness style, in which a character's unadorned thoughts are conveyed in a manner roughly equivalent to the way our minds actually work. Themes critics continuously note in the novel are order, honor, and sin. Works Cited Absalom, H.
P. Order and Disorder in The Sound and the Fury. Durham University Journal, 58 (December 1965), 30 - 39. Brown, May Cameron. The Language of Chaos: Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury. American Literature 51 (January 1980), 544 - 553.
Clerc, Charles. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. Explicator 24 (November 1965), Item 29. Faber, M. D. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury: Object Relations and Narrative Structure.
American Imago 34 (Winter 1977), 327 - 350. Faulkner in the University, ed. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph Brother (New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1965; the University Press of Virginia, 1959; reprinted 1977): 1 - 3. Gunter, Richard.
Style and Language in The Sound and the Fury. Mississippi Quarterly 12 (Summer 1969), 264 - 79. Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury: A Hypertext Edition. 21, August, 2004. < web >. The Mississippi Writers Page: William Faulkner (1897 - 1962). 21, August, 2004. < web >. Classic Notes: William Faulkner. 21, August, 2004. < web >.
William Faulkner on the Web. 21, August, 2004. < web >.
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