William Faulkner accepted his Nobel Peace Prize in December 1950. During his acceptance speech, Faulkner proclaimed that the award was made not to him as a man, but to his life’s work, which was created, “out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.” (PF ) He felt that the modern writer had lost connection to his spirit and that he must reconnect with the universal truths of the heart—“love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” (PF ) Through his characters voice and exposure of their spirit, Faulkner solidified man’s immortality by “lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.”(PF ) Although some critics have characterized his work as violet, dealing with immoral themes and the miseries and brutality of life; it can be argued that even his most sad and depraved characters express positive virtues and personal strengths, even if by a negative example. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the portrayal and manifestation of the human spirit in a select few of William Faulkner’s literary characters, showing that they possess both human strength and flaws.
So what is the human spirit and why is it significant? It is a somewhat indefinable concept. According to Faulkner the human spirit is the connection to the universal truths of the heart—“love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” (PF) But more than that, he was concerned with the idea that man had become oblivious to the problems of the spirit; that he lost his awareness of the inner struggle of heart in conflict with itself. The human spirit can also be described in terms of survi...
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At one point or another in life, everyone has to make decisions that change one's life forever. Usually one encounters an event or a thing that propels such a decision. In William Faulkner's short story, "Barn Burning," Sarty, a young boy, is going through a period of initiation into adult life. During this process, he has to make a life altering decision. For Sarty, his father's fires become the element that plays many roles and eventually drives him to decide the path of his life.
On December 10, 1950, in Stockholm, Sweden, one of the greatest literary minds of the twentieth century, William Faulkner, presented his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. If one reads in between the lines of this acceptance speech, they can detect a certain message – more of a cry or plead – aimed directly to adolescent authors and writers, and that message is to be the voice of your own generation; write about things with true importance. This also means that authors should include heart, soul, spirit, and raw, truthful emotion into their writing. “Love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice” (Faulkner) should all be frequently embraced – it is the duty of authors to do so. If these young and adolescent authors ignore this message and duty, the already endangered state of literature will continue to diminish until its unfortunate extinction.
William Faulkner’s short story “Barn Burning” describes a typical relationship between wealthy people and poor people during the Civil War.
Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner refuse to surrender to the temptation of writing fanciful stories where the hero defeats the villain and everyone lives happily ever after. Instead, these two writers reveal realistic portrayals of death and the downfall of man. Remarkably, O’Connor and Faulkner’s most emotionally degraded characters fail to believe that an omnipotent deity controls their fate. This belief directly correlates to the characters’ inability to follow a strict set of morals or value human life. On the other hand, one might expect Faulkner and O’Connor’s “Christian” characters to starkly contrast the vile heathens who deny the existence of God. However, these characters struggle to follow their own standards of morality.
William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” symbolizes the destructiveness of the human ego through the character, Abner Snopes. Throughout the story, Snopes functions and communicates based on his own logic. He has no regard for his family, superiors, or the judicial system. His unrelenting effort to live according to what he deems as “right” creates an atmosphere of fear and oppression.
In As I Lay Dying the Bundren family faces many hardships dealing with death and physical nature. Nature plays a major role in moving Faulkner’s story. Nature takes a toll on the family in their time of despair of losing a loved one. They are challenged by human nature and the nature of the elements. Throughout the story the family overcomes the human nature of emotions and the nature of the weather. They face nature in the most peculiar ways, like a flood that keeps them from crossing, the decaying body of Addie, and how they all grieve over the death of Addie; Dewey Dell said, “I heard that my mother is dead. I wish I had time to let her die. I wish I had time to wish I had” (Faulkner 110). The forces of nature compete with the Burden family.
Life with an abusive out of control parent often leads the offspring to grow up quicker than their years. In William Faulkner’s Barn Burning, one is taken on the journey of Colonel Sartoris Snopes (Sarty) growing up and maturing quicker than need be. Young Sarty is faced with the difficult decision of being loyal to his bloodline or to be loyal to himself. Ultimately Sarty had the strength and courage to break free from the verbal chains of fear that his father placed upon him and do the right thing, by telling on his father. This paper will highlight the two main events that were responsible for providing Sarty with the confidence and courage to do the right thing.
Through the support of the narrator’s tone, these two diversely different characters are brought together because they go through the same strategies and expressions of pain, unhappiness, injustice and abuse. Faulkner’s brilliant writing style and tone through the voice of the narrator creates a dynamic story that discusses several critical points, such as the struggles of victims and their strategies. Through two characters the author was able to describe the different reactions of victims, as well as, allow the audience to form and label the antagonist and protagonist.
William Faulkner, recognized as one of the greatest writers of all time, once made a speech as he accepted his Nobel prize for writing in which he stated that a great piece of writing should contain the truths of the heart and the conflicts that arise over these truths. These truths were love, honor, pity, pride, compassion and sacrifice. Truly it would be hard to argue that a story without these truths would be considered even a good story let alone a great one. So the question brought forward is whether Faulkner uses his own truths of the heart to make his story "Barn Burning." Clearly the answer to this question is yes; his use of the truths of the heart are prevalent
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.
William Faulkner’s life was defined by his inability to conduct himself as a true Southern gentleman. He never achieved affluence, strength, chivalry or honor. Therefore, the myth of Southern masculinity eluded him. Faulkner shied away from violence, he never proved himself in battle. He was not a hard worker, nor was he an excellent family man. Seemingly worst of all, he did not follow in the footsteps of his father and the “Old Colonel.” The code of Southern gentility highly praises family tradition. As a born and bred Southerner I can attest to this fact. Every man in my family for ten generations has been a plumber. It is the utmost honor for a man to follow his father’s example. Faulkner, unfortunately, was incapable of really living like his father. Therefore, I believe Faulkner’s collective failures are rooted in the fact that he could not live up to the standards set by the men in his family.
In this book, and others of this series, it was commonplace to find sentences that stretched on for a page in order to create mood, multiple narrators, or short stories complicated with a stream-of-consciousness blather that was hard to understand. Therefore, readers had difficulty following these novels, and Faulkner’s popularity soon dwindled, that is until Malcolm Cowley wrote The Portable Faulkner, which contained excerpts from the Yoknapatawpha series, and made Faulkner’s genius evident to his readers. Shortly thereafter, many of Faulkner’s works were reissued and he became a literary giant, and was even awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. Until death, Faulkner continued to create works of literature, including both short stories and novels.
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.
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