Faulkner presents sexual desire in The Sound and the Fury as a paradox of both entrapment and freedom. As he works his way through the nonlinear piece, information about sexuality of the characters, sexual symbols, and unfilled desire present themselves, each commenting on one another directly and indirectly. T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” serves as a helpful lens in understanding the requirements to escape the waste land of the ruined Compson family by providing a backdrop on which The Sound and the Fury can be projected. In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner experiments with the placement of the individual in respect to time and other characters in order to introduce sexual discourse in a way that comments on the necessity of sexual understanding in the modern world.
T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” offers an interpretation of the modern world that on one hand underscores the disillusionment of the future in a world that is fragmented and bare, and on the other hand, presents a case for recognizing freedom and meaning in the “heap of broken images” that make up the modern climate. The opening segment “The Burial of the Dead” looks toward a future that is composed of fragments and paradox. The fragments in the waste land that is presented are that of memory. More specifically, the fragments represent a failure in the human condition to connect memories of the past to those of the present in a way that is hopeful and inspiring. Jewel Spears Brooker and Joseph Bentley present this concept in Reading the Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation. Here they describe a waste land in which “She [Marie] perceives the dualistic and paradoxical present as cruel because, in remembering the past and intuiting the future, sh...
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...cter’s sexual desires but rather puts forth bits of imagery to suggest a meaning. This allows for the reader to interpret which version of sexual desire is the best. In a way, the text offers as many interpretations of sexuality in the modern sense as there are readers since the source of sexual desire is not always clearly stated. Faulkner implements in this way a circular logic to understand sexuality in the modern world, it is the cause of moral decay in the modern world, yet sexual desire is born out of the need to piece together the modern world in some way. Ultimately, one can read The Sound and the Fury through the lens of Eliot’s “The Waste Land” to gather the importance of hanging on to just enough of the past while surging toward the future, allowing desires to take hold and guide the characters to a destination that offers insight into one’s self.
In three dynamic pieces of literature, the desperate yet hopeful characters gallantly endure the struggles of achieving their dreams as they experience the pain of desolation and the life-fulfilling happiness of a friendly companion. Through hostile resentment, the intense repulsion created by generations of territorial disputes tears apart two vengeful foes, Ulrich and Georg, in Saki’s captivating tale. Whereas in Remarque’s gory war novel, the pure terror of battle brutally slaughters the once innocent minds of soldiers as they undergo changes in their heart and soul within themselves. Although impervious to the influence of the reclusive residents tied to the ranch, as they quest for their shared aspirations, George and Lennie forge an invincible friendship in Steinbeck’s calamitous novelette.
In this essay I will be exploring and contrasting the relationships of two characters. These characters are Stephen Wraysford of Sebastian Faulks' romantic yet graphically violent novel "Birdsong" and Victor Mancini of anarchic social commentator Chuck Palahniuk's "Choke." "Birdsong" darts between the early 1900s and the 1970s, although Stephen does not appear in the latter dates, and his story is accounted by his granddaughter Elizabeth. "Choke" is a contemporary novel, based in America in the late 20th/early 21st century. In both novels, there are strong messages about relationships, and how they can contribute to the development of a person. While both books may share similar messages, there are massive differences. The main point of contrast is the difference between lust and love.
But Pynchon's culture is not one haunted by the ghosts, except for the ghosts in Hamlet and Scooby-Doo. Faulkner's landscape is tortured by the tragedy of the South. In his view, the land is cursed because of two of the white man's presumptions: that he could own other men, and that he could own the land. Focusing on the microcosm of the fallen Compson family, Faulkner details the extent to which various family members are saddled by past loss and how they confront their searing memories. In what has canonized The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner recreat...
This scene from William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury illustrates Faulkner’s incredible talent for storytelling that has enabled him to trap readers and critics in his spectrum of characters for decades. Weaving intense characters together with stories of despair and triumph, Faulkner produces a tapestry that blankets readers with his love/hate relationship with the South. However, in his novel The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner employs a vastly different method of creation. This story unfolds as a patchwork of chronological events told through the experiences, memories, and interpretations of three brothers infatuated and obsessed with the actions and absence of their sister, Caddy. Consisting of a multitude of colors laid out by Caddy’s actions and her brothers’ reactions, Faulkner’s true patchwork genius lies in the craftsmanship of his seam. Binding together multi-colored material created by similar experiences, Faulkner’s stitching takes on a radically different, almost haphazard appearance. With each Compson brother producing a different type of stitching due to vastly different interpretations of their s...
When read for the first time, The Waste Land appears to be a concoction of sorts, a disjointed poem. Lines are written in different languages, narrators change, and the scenes seem disconnected, except for the repeated references to the desert and death. When read over again, however, the pieces become coherent. The Waste Land is categorized as a poem, but exhibited visually, it appears to be a literary collage. And when standing back and viewing the collage from afar, a common theme soon emerges. Eliot collects aspects from different cultures or what he calls cultural memories. These assembled memories depict a lifeless world, in which the barrenness of these scenes speak of a wasted condition. He concentrates on women, including examples of violence committed against them and the women's subsequent lack of response to this violence, to show how apathetic the world is. But The Waste Land is not a social commentary on the plight of women. Rather, the women's non-reaction to the violence against them becomes a metaphor for the impotence of the human race to respond to pain. Violence recurs throughout time, and as Eliot points to in his essay "Tradition and Individual Talent" in the epigraph, we can break this cycle of violence and move ahead only by learning from the past and applying this knowledge to the present.
Kimberly Tsau, for example, follows De Quincey's lead in her analysis of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, suggesting that among the violence, apathy, and disjointedness of the poem is a call to face and learn from suffering. Her essay, "Hanging in a Jar," examines how Eliot collects a variety of "cultural memories," cutting and pasting them together to form a collection that is both terrifying and edifying.
Eliot, T.S. The wasteland. In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume II. Edited by Paul Lauter et al. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1991: 1447-1463.
Margaret Mitchell’s epic tale is impossible to dissolve down to a “brief” description. Her story is the War and Peace of Southern Literature. It is a tale of extremes and contrasts, telling the tragic story of peaceful affluence destroyed by the ravages of war and the destitution and desolation of its aftermath. It is a love story that examines the motivations of the heart contrasted against the will to survive. It is a story of the destruction of an aristocratic society and its disintegration from nobility, honor and hope to humility, disgrace and despair. It is a historical novel and graphic retelling of the Civil War and the Reconstruction of the South as well as a journal of the human side of those events as it recounts the characters struggles to adapt as their lives and their world crumbles. Gone with the Wind is a literary classic that gives the reader a compelling history wrapped in a thrilling romance. Mitchell recreates an idyllic Antebellum Society complete with simpering Southern Belles and Noble Gentlemen, grand plantations and vast fields of cotton, privileged white land-owners contrasted against the poverty of captive black slaves. She details a horrific reenactment of the bloody clash between the Southern Rebels and the Northern Yankees, then like the Phoenix, she raises the South from its own ashes to a new, but very different way of life. Somehow in this rich and vibrant historical tale she manages to bring her equally rich and vibrant character’s lives along the same metaphorical path of affluence, destruction and survival in a mesmerizing account that is the stuff of legend.
In many of Faulkner’s stories, he tells about an imaginary county in Mississippi named Yoknapatawpha. He uses this county as the setting for his story “Barn Burning” and it is also thought that the town of Jefferson from “A Rose for Emily” is located in Yoknapatawpha County. The story of a boy’s struggle between being loyal to his family or to his community makes “Barn Burning” exciting and dramatic, but a sense of awkwardness and unpleasantness arrives from the story of how the fictional town of Jefferson discovers that its long time resident, Emily Grierson, has been sleeping with the corpse of her long-dead friend with whom she has had a relationship with.
“Woman, what would you be like seen from the sky?” (20), Stephen Dobyns implicates through this aerial metaphor a striking sexual encounter, illustrating the theme for his poem “Roughhousing”. Indirectly, Dobyns uses multiple references to rouse the graphic nature of rough sex. With emphasis on “Rough”, the speaker provides visually appalling descriptions to eliminate a perception of deceit. Therefore, through the compound of contradicting diction, sexually severe allusions, and suggestive metaphors, Stephen Dobyns reveals perverted distractions to intensify and discredit the speaker’s attempt to conceal pseudo-sexual mutuality.
“This is the dead land this is the cactus land” describes a vacant, dead environment. Eliot uses the barren desert to show the lifelessness of the hollow men, despite the fact that they are alive. The lack of life in that environment perfectly describes the lives of the people with no dreams that Eliot is trying to describe. Truly, the men lack any spirit and life, which Eliot showed through the imagery and characteri...
The Modernist era of poetry, like all reactionary movements, was directed, influenced, and determined by the events preceding it. The gradual shift away from the romanticized writing of the Victorian Era served as a litmus test for the values, and the shape of poetry to come. Adopting this same idea, William Carlos Williams concentrated his poetry in redirecting the course of Modernist writing, continuing a break from the past in more ways than he saw being done, particularly by T.S. Eliot, an American born poet living abroad. Eliot’s monumental poem, The Waste Land, was a historically rooted, worldly conscious work that was brought on by the effects of World War One. The implementation of literary allusions versus imagination was one point that Williams attacked Eliot over, but was Williams completely in stride with his own guidelines? Looking closely at Williams’s reactionary poem to The Waste Land, Spring and All, we can question whether or not he followed the expectations he anticipated of Modernist work; the attempts to construct new art in the midst of a world undergoing sweeping changes.
On the other hand Brantenberg’s novel exploits the real worlds views of sexuality and applies them in th...
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is an elaborate and mysterious montage of lines from other works, fleeting observations, conversations, scenery, and even languages. Though this approach seems to render the poem needlessly oblique, this style allows the poem to achieve multi-layered significance impossible in a more straightforward poetic style. Eliot’s use of fragmentation in The Waste Land operates on three levels: first, to parallel the broken society and relationships the poem portrays; second, to deconstruct the reader’s familiar context, creating an individualized sense of disconnection; and third, to challenge the reader to seek meaning in mere fragments, in this enigmatic poem as well as in a fractious world.
Alienation is a concurrent theme in many of the Faulkner’s novels. He presents us this theme clearly in Light in August with his descriptive choice of setting as we are walked through Jefferson from the Reverend Gail Hightower’s cabin to the mysterious estate of Joanna Burden. The slightly complicated plot tells the story of each character and how they reached to the present time of alienation. And his use of tone, misogynistic in nature, adds to the central theme. Faulkner’s use of these three techniques allowed the reader to recognize and relate to the feeling of alienation.