William Faulkner was a god-fearing man, and wrote to similar people. However, in his Magnum Opus, “The Sound and The Fury”, Faulner goes out of his way to take another look at the Christian faith, highlight the negatice aspects of Christ, and them contrasting them with the glory and holiness of the resurrection. In “The Sound and The Fury”, each one of the narrative characters represents a single aspect of a flawed Christ, while a simple the family caretaker, represents the glory and goodness of the resurrection and Christ’s light.
The reader encounters the first “Flawed Christ” in the form of Benji Compson, formerly Maury, who is widely held to be Christ the loving. Faulkner makes it explicitly clear that Benji is Christ by not only making him 33, (traditionally held to be Christ’s age at the time of the crucifixion), but also by setting his narrative on Holy Thursday; in addition to this, the case can be made that Benji’s fixation with trees is intended to remind the reader of the tree that Jesus himself died on. In the same way that Benji was linked to Christ, he has even more importantly linked to love- he never attempts any form of violence, or even engages in any malicious acts during his narrative. The loving Christ Benji has been linked to is the Christ seen in John 8:7 (“Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone”), or Matthew 19:14 (“let the children come to me”). However, Benji is a flawed Christ; he is too overwhelmed by his Christ-like love and emotion to do anything meaningful with his time aside from gathering flowers, miss his lost family members, and wander about. This, of course, could be attributed to the character’s mental disability, but it could also be the cause of his mental disability; Faulkner le...
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... manner; she can be angered, but is never pointlessly angry.
In summation, there can be no doubt that William Faulkner intended for the characters in his greatest work “The Sound and The Fury” to be parallels for some of the chracteristics of Jesus Christ; through selection of time, carefully employed diction, and selection of detail, Faulkner made his characters perfect parallels for certain aspects of Jesus, albeit in a perverted manner. There can be no doubt that this was intentional and done to highlight a new way of thinking about the Christian faith.
Works Cited
The Holy Bible, King James Version. Cambridge Edition: 1769; King James Bible Online, 2014. http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/.
Gunn, Giles. “Faulkner’s Heterodoxy: Faith and Family in The Sound and the Fury.” Fowler and Abadie, Faulkner and Religion (1991). 44-64. [Read, not Cited directly]
“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” by Jonathan Edwards and “The Minister’s Black Veil” by Nathaniel Hawthorne are both 1700s Puritan works of literature with similarities, as well as differences, from their theme to tone and to what type of literary work they are. Edwards and Hawthorne are both expressing the topics of how people are all sinners, especially in regards to their congregation and that questions their congregation’s faith.
The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make them appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the blind you draw large and
Wright grew up in the Jim Crow South where everything about his life was socially and culturally inferior to the white masses. In Bloom’s Modern Critical Views Richard Wright, Qiana J. Whitted wrote about Wright’s life as a kid, shedding light on how his grandmother forced him to partake in religious in order to be saved from “religious execution” (123). It was this type of religious interpretation held by his grandmother, that was a “cultural marker” for Wright, reminding us, “that in his life, as in his writing, Richard Wright wrestled with his faith” (122). This struggle can be seen in Wright’s male character, Big Boy, in Big Boy Leaves Homes. Big Boy and his friends go to swimming creek where they see and are saw by a white woman. With the woman, was a white man who shot at Big Boy and his friends. Big Boy wrestles with Jim over the gun and ends up shooting and killing him. In panic, he runs home to retell the story of the murder he committed and the ones he witnessed. As he tells the story, his father sends for some of the religious members in the community. During this time Big Boy’s mother calls out several times for mercy, “Lawd Gawd in Heaven, have mercy on us all!” (36). The religious community members become a fist around Big Boy and come up with a plan for saving his life. In the midst of this Big Boy experiences an internal conflict with his actions and how they look in the eyes of God.
“The other Jesus”; a book that reveals the true meaning of being a Christian and gives another view on the characteristics on Jesus, Garrett shows the beauty of the Gospel and how it differs from other religions views on Jesus. In studying the Christianity of the American society he gives his own personal rendition of how this chase for the true meaning of Jesus started: “When, after twenty-five years of wondering, I came back to church, I finally encountered the Other Jesus. I discovered an authentic message of love and acceptance, the one that the Other Jesus seems to be exemplifying in the Christian Testament….I discovered believers who were trying to live lives that reflected the change this Other Jesus had wrought in them. I discovered people who practiced faith as well as preached it.” (Garrett. 8)
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.
Brewer, Nadine. "Christ, Satan, and Southern Protestantism in O'Connor's Fiction." Flannery O'Connor Bulletin 14 (1985): 103-111. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec. Vol. 132. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Literature Resource Center. Web. 25 Nov. 2013
A Christian, when faced with the challenge of writing, finds himself in a dilemma: how is he to complete the task? Should he create an allegory? Should he try to teach a lesson reflecting God’s glory? Or should he follow secular trends and current desires in literature? To this, many Christians would say, “Certainly not!” Dorothy L. Sayers and Flannery O’Connor both aim to answer the first question of any Christian writer: How do I write a story with my beliefs?
Brooks, Cleanth. "William Faulkner: Visions of Good and Evil." Faulkner, New Perspectives. Ed. Richard H. Brodhead. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey : Prentice-Hall, 1983.
The English Standard Version Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments with Apocrypha. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.
Jim Casy’s actions bore a close resemblance to the actions of Jesus Christ. In the time the book was published, this was viewed as an act of blasphemy. As discussed in class, many of the acts, trials, and tribulations of Jim Casy (along with the ominous JC initials) parallel those of Jesus. Jim Casy represents the epitome of personal reverence, despite his renunciation of preaching.
... was before. It is this striving as a fireman, the pursuing of knowledge symbolized by Clarisse, and the symbolism of Jesus in the existence of books that alludes to the early stages of a Christian life. People are lost in the world until Jesus comes after them and they are initially enlightened to the scope of eternity. The following escape, death of the civilian, crossing of the river, and enthrallment with nature demonstrate the flee from the sin-filled world, death to old self, baptism, and enlightenment that a Christian goes through. Bradbury offers a very thorough look at the Christian life with a plethora of other symbolisms throughout such as the hardening of hearts, community, and the end of time according to the Bible. Bradbury shows his brilliance in this novel and whether by choice or chance, depicts Guy as a prototypical Bible hero from page one to 165.
Holy Bible: the New King James Version, Containing the Old and New Testaments.Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Bibles, 1982. Print.
Palumbo, Donald. "The Concept of God in Faulkner's "Light in August," "The Sound and the Fury," "As I Lay Dying" and "Absalom, Absalom!"" The South Central Bulletin 39.4 (1979): 142-46. JSTOR. Web. 23 Mar. 2014.
The Holy Bible: giant print ; containing the Old and New Testaments translated out of the original tongues ; and with the former translations diligently compared and revised, by His Majesty's special command, authorized King James version ; words of Chri. Giant print reference ed. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Pub. House, 1994.
Bibles, Crossway. The Holy Bible: English Standard Version: Containing the Old and New Testaments. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010. Print.