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faulkner's influence
the theme of faulkner's works
william faulkner literary criticism
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Use of Stream of Consciousness in Faulkner and Salinger
How does an author paint a vivid picture of a character’s thoughts? Stream of consciousness, an elaborate, somewhat complicated technique of writing, is a successful method of getting inside of a character’s head. It is not only seeing their actions and environment, it is also understanding their entire thought process through what seems to be a chain reaction.
While a character is performing actions and taking in surroundings through senses, thought flows through his or her mind mimicking the mind of a real person. Faulkner deliberately avoids using punctuation usage to encourage the selection of images and random recollections. Indirect interior monologue is interior monologue in the third person. (1, 210) The term interior monologue is sometimes used interchangeably with “stream of consciousness,” although not some claim the words are not the same exact thing. These people claim that “stream of consciousness” is a kind of fiction. It is a narrative technique that is the multi-faceted movement of rational and irrational thoughts and ideas not constrained by syntax, grammar, and sensible transitions. There are two types: indirect and direct interior monologue. In indirect interior monologue, the narrator sometimes interjects flow of ideas (1, 209). It is a combination of successive impressions in the present interjected by related thoughts, past experiences, and recollections (1, 210). They consider interior monologue a type of the fiction, as opposed to free indirect discourse and simple first-person narration. (15, 217) There is a tendency for people to consider stream of consciousness to be a kind of fiction that represents the consciousness of a characte...
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Salinger. New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2008. Print.
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Carrousel: Sources East and West for Salinger’s Catcher.” Bloom’s Literature. Facts on File, Inc. Web. 30 Sept. 2013.
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Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. New York: Bantam, 1951. Print.
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York City: 1959. Language and Literature Resource Guide. United States Academic Decathlon.
Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1951. Print.
Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1991. Print.
Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1991. Print.
Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1991. Print.
Salinger, J. D.. The Catcher in the Rye. [1st ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 19511945. Print.
Salinger, J. D.. The Catcher in the Rye. [1st ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 19511945. Print.
perceive the novel in the rational of an eleven-year-old girl. One short, simple sentence is followed by another , relating each in an easy flow of thoughts. Gibbons allows this stream of thoughts to again emphasize the childish perception of life’s greatest tragedies. For example, Gibbons uses the simple diction and stream of consciousness as Ellen searches herself for the true person she is. Gibbons uses this to show the reader how Ellen is an average girl who enjoys all of the things normal children relish and to contrast the naive lucidity of the sentences to the depth of the conceptions which Ellen has such a simplistic way of explaining.
Roemer, Danielle M. "The Personal Narrative and Salinger's Catcher in the Rye". Western Folklore 51 (1992): 5-10.
Stevick, Philip. "J(erome) D(avid) Salinger." American Short-Story Writers, 1910-1945: Second Series. Ed. Bobby Ellen Kimbel. Detroit: Gale Research, 1991. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 102. Literature Resource Center. Web. 3 Feb. 2014.
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, and Yoknapatawpha William Faulkner, one of America’s great modernist writers, born in New Albany, Mississippi on September 25, 1897 and died on July 6, 1962. He was the author of many novels and short stories… and was even awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. One of his most famous novels written was, As I Lay Dying. Faulkner spent most of his writing life in Mississippi and set all of his fiction there. Using his literary prowess, Faulkner ultimately created an entire world out of his various novels in which he named Yoknapatawpha.
For instance, the narrator realizes that whenever he and his wife are alone, she becomes sheltered in her own sphere. This comes to mind, though with uncertainty, where he questions “whether the person I saw tinkering at the window was opening the latches or sealing the cracks” (32). What he doesn’t realize, and is oblivious to, is that the person she’s shutting herself away from was not just any person but himself. What’s more, the narrator is unaware of the changes happening to the world around him as the “ceiling” becomes visible upon his town. Even though he goes out day by day, as several months passed by, he was not conscious of the fact that the birds and insects had disappeared. He even claims that, “I did not notice they were gone though…until I read Joshua’s essay” (34). He’s blind to the world changing beneath his eyes, so how would he be aware of the status of his relationship if he can’t see what’s right in front of him? Even while getting his hair trimmed, and Wesson the barber asks him, “How’s the pretty lady?” the narrator replies, “‘She hasn’t been feeling to well,’ I said. ‘But I think she’s coming out of it” (34). He assumes that her abnormal behaviour lately is only a sort of phase that will simply pass by on its own, as time goes by. As a result, his incapability to recognize not only his wife’s change of demeanour but also
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:
Wildermuth, April. "Nonconformism in the Works of J.D. Salinger." 1997 Brighton High School. 24 November 2002. <http://ww.bcsd.org/BHS/english/mag97/papers/Salinger.htm>
The language used portrays the characters thoughts and emotions for example she goes into great detail about her surroundings (her life) and the events which had taken place there .She talks about her environment as if she is closely connected with the associations to which she describes.
Many important American writers came to prominence during the Jazz Age, but their commonalities often stopped there. From lyrical to sparse, many different styles can be seen among these authors, such as those of Henry James, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway. One stylistic technique, stream of consciousness, was most associated with Joyce. Yet, Hemingway also used this technique with regularity and it is an important element in his war novel, A Farewell to Arms. This technique uses the interior monologue of a character to convey information, and thus the reader is allowed a more fluid picture of the true thoughts of the character, in this case, Lieutenant Frederick Henry. Also, the information contained in these stream of consciousness passages would not have been as effectively expressed in traditional prose style.