Addie Bundren uses language as a vehicle for the assertion of her power. Like Darl, Addie realizes the confines and constrictions that language creates; utilizing language to signify what is lost. Her narrative chapter falls at the center of the novel uses very little italics in her speech. Unlike Caddie, in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Addie is the character in which the novel surrounds but she is allowed a voice as well. It is in her chapter that the reader becomes aware that Addie wanted her body taken to Jefferson for burial as a kind of retribution from Anse for the birth of Darl. Addie had not really wanted to be a mother, or a wife for that matter. Addie an articulate school teacher married Anse, an uneducated, brute farmer. Marriage and children bring Addie a loss of words and linguistic and literal imprisonment. She seemed to try to find meaning in actions and struggled with the concept of words and how they can never really mean what they are truly meant to. To Addie words are never enough to express thoughts and experiences. Words and language cannot articulately convey an emotion or concept. Words such as marriage, love and mother are all too limiting, vague and constricting to fully translate meaning and interpretation. In Addie’s section she italicizes the names “Anse”, “Cash” and “Darl” to place emphasis on them as names that represent more. As Addie referred to it, “I would think about his name until after a while I could see the word as a shape…It doesn’t matter what they call them.” (Faulkner 165) Addie seemed determined to prove the preposterousness of words, especially words that were titles. Addie became a wife and a mother because it was what was expected of a woman during that period. However, throug...
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...iscourse. Just as it is sometimes implausible to think of Faulkner’s characters as having the education to support their often poetic and stylistic language, it is equally confusing to construct the inner thoughts of the subconscious of a character. However, it is this very use of experimental equations of language that form the modernist monologues of Faulkner. Deconstructing Faulkner’s writing style can provide further understanding of his text but the most basic way of understanding Faulkner is to interpret the language of the heart along with the mind. Faulkner has been referred to a modernist and a misogynist. Faulkner the humanist describes him most accurately. His process of using language to construct and recreate the faults, triumphs and essence of what is distinctly human is why scholars continue to examine his works regardless of the answers are produced.
"William Faulkner: The Faded Rose of Emily." Mr. Renaissance. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Mar. 2011 .
William Faulkner is widely considered to be one of the great American authors of the twentieth century. Although his greatest works are identified with a particular region and time (Mississippi in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries), the themes he explores are universal. He was also an extremely accomplished writer in a technical sense. Novels such as The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! Feature bold experimentation with shifts in time and narrative. Several of his short stories are favorites of anthologists, including "A Rose for Emily." This strange story of love, obsession, and death is a favorite among both readers and critics. The narrator, speaking for the town of Jefferson in Faulkner 's fictional Yoknapatawpha
Faulkner has created a masterful piece of story telling in taking the reader through a suspenseful and captivating story. The effective use of foreshadowing does not diminish the climax of the story but rather enhance it by not giving out the details, but leaving it to the imagination of the reader. Through the organization of the structure of the storyline mixing with clever clues, Faulkner transforms Emily through the many tragic stages of her life and the ever-accompanying presence of death.
William Faulkner uses multiple narrators throughout The Sound and the Fury to depict the life of Caddy Compson without telling the story from her point-of-view. Benjy, a mentally disabled 33 year old, Quentin, a troubled and suicidal Harvard student, and Jason, a racist and greedy man, each give their drastically different sides of Caddy’s story to create an incomplete chronicle of her life. Faulkner’s first chapter explores Caddy’s life through the silent narrator Benjy. As a result of Benjy’s inability to talk, much of how he describes the world is through his heightened sensory awareness. Benjy constantly repeats the fact that, which, to Benjy, symbolizes Caddy’s innocence (Faulkner 6). Later in the novel when, Benjy realizes that Caddy has lost the innocence Benjy once idolized and loved (Faulkner 40).
In his Novel Prize Address, Faulkner states that an author must leave "no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart...love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice." He accuses his younger contemporaries of ignoring these noble spiritual pillars while pondering the atomic doom of mankind with questions like, "When will I be blown up?" Such physical fears, far from conflicts of the heart, are what plague his bomb-obsessed contemporaries. Yet Faulkner stands, seemingly alone, in opposition to this weakness; he "decline[s] to accept the end of man" and in rebelling, fights for the old universal truths and the glories of the past. In classical style, he brushes away passing fears and fads, settling for nothing less than the "problems of the human heart in conflict with itself." Nothing else is worth writing about and Faulkner's work is living proof.
Addie Bundren of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying has often been characterized as an unnatural, loveless, cold mother whose demands drive her family on a miserable trek to bury her body in Jefferson. For a feminist understanding of Addie, we have to move outside the traditional patriarchal definitions of "womanhood" or "motherhood" that demand selflessness from others, blame mothers for all familial dysfunction, and only lead to negative readings of Addie. She also has been characterized as yet another Faulkner character who is unable to express herself using language. This modernist view of the inexpressiblility of the creative spirit does not apply to Addie simply because she is not an artist; she is a woman and a mother, a person who feminist theorists would desribe as "traditionally mute." To characterize her using universalizing, humanist terms erases the way that her character is marked by her biological sex and by the gender roles she is forced to play. Addie is not a representative of humankind, or even of womankind, but an individual woman trapped in a partriarchal world that represses her desires and silences her; a woman who longs to find an identity of her own that is outside patriarchal constructions and not always definable in relation to the men and the children in her life. Most importantly, Addie is a character who is acutely aware of the linguistic and social oppression that traps her into a life she does not want.
On September 25, 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, a son was born to Murry Cuthbert and Maud Butler Faulkner. This baby, born into a proud, genteel Southern family, would become a mischievous boy, an indifferent student, and drop out of school; yet “his mother’s faith in him was absolutely unshakable. When so many others easily and confidently pronounced her son a failure, she insisted that he was a genius and that the world would come to recognize that fact” (Zane). And she was right. Her son would become one of the most exalted American writers of the 20th century, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature and two Pulitzers during his lifetime. Her son was William Faulkner.
"William Faulkner (1897-1962)." Short Story Criticism. Ed. Jelena Krstovic. Vol. 97. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2007. 1-3. Literature Criticism Online. Gale. Hempfield High School. 31 March 2010.
Perry, Manakhelm “Literary Dynamics: How the Order of a Text Creates Its Meanings [With an Analysis of Faulkner’s “A rose for Emily”] Poetics today (1979). 35-65+311-365
Caddy's brother Benji is mentally retarded, making him out of contact with reality. He never speaks, we only hear his basic impulsive wants, needs and feelings. Benji represents Faulkner's id. The id only knows what it wants, it doesn't know why or how or whether is it right or wrong. Benji loves Caddy more than anything but he does not have the intellectual power to say what he wants to say. Faulkner writes Benji as his id in order to indulge himself in his basic feelings of love and attachment for Caddy. Here we see her as a woman who is always there for him, promises never to leave him. Benji repeats over and over that Caddy "smells like trees." (Faulkner 6). She is organic, natural, innocent and free-spirited.
Growing up in Mississippi in the late Nineteenth Century and the early part of the Twentieth Century, young William Faulkner witnessed first hand the struggles his beloved South endured through their slow progression of rebuilding. These experiences helped to develop Faulkner’s writing style. “Faulkner deals almost exclusively with the Southern scene (with) the Civil War … always behind his work” (Warren 1310. His works however are not so much historical in nature but more like folk lore. This way Faulkner is not constrained to keep details accurate, instead he manipulate the story to share his on views leading the reader to conclude morals or lessons from his experience. Faulkner writes often and “sympathetically of the older order of the antebellum society. It was a society that valued honor, (and) was capable of heroic action” (Brooks 145) both traits Faulkner admired. These sympathetic views are revealed in the story “A Rose for Emily” with Miss Emily becoming a monument for the Antebellum South.
...However, this doesn’t deter Faulkner from writing very complex stories that reflect his literary prowess. Most of his characters can hardly speak correct English, and yet, his pieces are filled with words that even I have trouble discerning meaning from. In particular, Rider’s character is very blue collar. Faulkner communicates this to us in many ways, but has no trouble throwing in phrases like “the junctureless backloop of times trepan”. This occurs throughout all of these stories. It is like the characters are very natural, they know the environment, the have the skills to hunt, they work hard, and they love each other. But these ideas are contrasted by his writing style and complexity and really blend nicely to create very good pieces of literature. It was just one thing that caught my eye in reading these pieces and I am very envious of this skill he possesses.
First of all, I think that Sound and Fury was an appropriate film for us to view and analyze in this class. I enjoyed the lecture given after we viewed it, epically because it was brought to my attention that the follow up film was funded by people who make cochlear implants. We were reminded that not all documentaries are non-fiction or unbiased! I really appreciated that because I love watching documentaries (I think I needed that reminder). I also enjoyed the film, I thought it was interesting because I knew very little about the deaf word before. I have a hearing friend whose parents are both deaf, Sound and Fury made me much more curious about her childhood and how she and her sister developed speech. It also opened my eyes to how important deaf culture can be to deaf people!
But Faulkner develops his own, more structured variety of stream of consciousness. In his densest paragraphs, he often lets his characters fall into reveries in which they perceive more deeply than their conscious minds possibly could. His characters connect past and present and reflect on the meaning of events and on the relationships between them in a manner that sounds more like Faulkner himself than like the characters in their usual states of mind.
Brooks, Cleanth. "William Faulkner: Visions of Good and Evil." Faulkner, New Perspectives. Ed. Richard H. Brodhead. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey : Prentice-Hall, 1983.