William Faulkner envisioned time as something purely subjective, violently turbulent and yet that which could grant hope and redemption. Time became something that above all else (as it was to embody modernism’s study of medium rather than object) was definitive in understanding man’s approach to the world. Such was Faulkner’s idea of time’s consequence that he let it come sweeping down through the Compson siblings’ lives in his novel, The Sound and the Fury, hurtling Caddy, doomed, toward “dishonor and shame,” leaving Benjy, “neuter… eyeless…groping,” wandering lost in the past, unaware of any future, driving Quentin toward “oblivion,” letting Jason seethe in an endless rage, and finally passing Dilsey, untouched, “to stand above the fallen ruins” embodying eternity and hope (Faulkner p. 231). Thus, each of his characters relation to their temporal experience became their defining characteristic, where the obsessive nature of the mind splintered the established conception of chronological time. Moreover, the Compson story is one told in layers of narration, with each shift in perspective attempting to illuminate and render Faulkner’s vision of Caddy’s tragedy and courage. Each of these strains of narrative is a composed fragment of a larger unattainable truth, a distortion of what has happened, brought on by the obsessive quality of the mind such that only through the multiple tellings of Caddy’s submission to Dalton Ames does clarity emerge. This was Faulkner’s – as one of the helmsmen of American modernism – attempt to break away from the “omniscience that denies the reality of time”(Borg p 289). As modernists began to focus on the mechanism of how the story was told, rather than the story itself, straightforward linear tempo...
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Burtun, Stacy. "Benjy, Narrativity, and the Coherence of Compson History." Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 7.2 (1995): 207-28. Web.
Faulkner, William, and David Minter. The Sound and the Fury: A Norton Critical Edition. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton &, 1993. Web.
McGann, Mary E. ""The Waste Land" and "The Sound and the Fury": To Apprehend the Human Process Moving in Time." The Southern Literary Journal 9.1 (1976): 13-21. Web.
Messerli, Douglas. "The Problem of Time in "The Sound and the Fury": A Critical Reassessment and Reinterpretation." The Southern Literary Journal 6.2 (1974): 19-41. Web.
Swiggart, Peter. "Moral and Temporal Order in "The Sound and The Fury"" The Sewanee Review 61.2 (1983): 221-37. Web.
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Faulkner, William. The Sound and The Fury. Harrison Smith and Jonathan Cape, 1929. Corrected text, Vintage Books, a division of Random House,
Abrams, M. H. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1993.
Over the course of Kurt Vonnegut’s career, an unorthodox handling of time became one of many signature features in his fictional works (Allen 37). Despite The Sirens of Titan (1959) being only his second novel, this trademark is still prevalent. When delving into science fiction, it is often helpful to incorporate ideas from other works within the genre. This concept is exemplified by the “megatext,” an aspect of science fiction that involves the application of a reader’s own knowledge of the genre to a new encounter (Evans xiii). By working within the megatext, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974) provides an insightful avenue in exploring the handling of time and its consequences in Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan.
A key theme in William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury is the deterioration of the Compson family. May Brown focuses on this theme and explains that Quentin is the best character to relate the story of a family torn apart by” helplessness, perversion, and selfishness.” In his section, there is a paradoxical mixture of order and chaos which portrays the crumbling world that is the core of this novel.
Murphy, B. & Shirley J. The Literary Encyclopedia. [nl], August 31, 2004. Available at: http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2326. Access on: 22 Aug 2010.
Faulkner, William. "Barn Burning." The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. 3th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. 1554-66.
Harmon, William, and C. Hugh Holman. A Handbook to Literature. 8th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999.
Brooks, Cleanth. "William Faulkner: Visions of Good and Evil." Faulkner, New Perspectives. Ed. Richard H. Brodhead. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey : Prentice-Hall, 1983.
" American Literature 58.2 (May 1986): 181-202. Wright, Richard. A.
Bergson’s philosophy apparently influenced Faulkner’s notion of time, an admission he has made in an interview with Loic Bouvard. He remarked, “In fact I agree pretty much with Bergson’s theory of the fluidity of time” (Lion in the Garden 70). In the Bergsonian scheme, man experience time as period, a continuous stream, according to which, past, present, and future are not rigid and clear-cut points of difference in time, but they flow in one’s consciousness, persistently impacting one another. From this angle, the past is not strictly past; on the other hand, it is conserved in the present as a living force that influences the way in which one undergoes the present. Furthermore, in different interviews, Faulkner explained that his outlook of time was linked to his aesthetic view:
Abrams, M.H., et al. ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. 2 Vols. New York: Norton, 1993.
Wall, Carey. "The Sound and the Fury: The Emotional Center." The Midwest Quarterly 11.4 (July 1970): 371-387. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism Select. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Literature Resource Center. Web. 12 Feb. 2014.
Abrams, M.H., ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. Vol. 2. New York: Norton, 1993.
William Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury" (1929) is one of the monuments of High Modernism. It was the dark side of the social scene, that caught Faulkner's imagination and makes him delves deeply into the social structure of the Americans. He shows the fall and the decay of the family as a unit of society, the failure of the family to hold together and its damaging. The Compson family is one of the samples of a disintegrated and ruined American family whose members are characterized by absence of either the parental or the maternal role, lack of respect and constant conflict, which has shaken the balance of their family leading to its disintegration. Compson family Children are living a life of prisoners of family manners and beliefs in
Abrams, M. H. et al. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 5th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1986.