What themes do you see in the novel?
Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury, has numerous themes. While reading the novel, several themes stood out to me more than others. From the beginning of the book, we see how time, the past and its meaning play a large role in each characters life. This fixation on the past and guilt from the past also gives way to the theme of family honor and how that plays into the aristocratic life of the Compson family.
The first chapter is narrated by Benjy, a person with both physical and mental disabilities. This chapter was incredibly difficult to follow and took me nearly the entire chapter to really get a sense of what is happening in it. It is obvious that Benjy was disabled; however, the difficult part of the reading was following the time-lapses that surround his narration. Benjy has no real concept of time, so the story is in and out of past memories that tie together later in the novel.
“He was thrashing about and laughing and I tried to get up. The cellar steps ran up the hill in the moonlight and T.P. fell up the hill, into the moonlight, and I ran against the fence and T.P. ran behind me saying. ‘Hush up hush up.’ Then he fell into the flowers, laughing, and I ran into a box, but when I tried to climb onto it it jumped away and hit me on the back of the head and my throat made a sound. It made the sound again and I stopped trying to get up, and it made the sound again and I began to cry. But my throat kept on making the sound while T.P. was pulling me. It kept on making it and T.P. fell down on top of me laughing, laughing and it kept on making the sound and Quentin kicked T.P. and Caddy put her arms around me, and her shining veil, and I couldn’t smell trees anymore and I began to cry” (40)...
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... disgracing the Compson family name. “That’s just what I’m thinking of-flesh. And a little blood too, if I had my way. When people act like niggers, no matter who they are the only thing to do is treat them like a nigger” (181). Here is another example of Jason’s feelings of how Miss Quentin should be treated when she acts in the same way as her mother.
Jason keeps the money Caddy sends to Miss Quentin every month. Jason feels him “confiscating” the money is his right. He feels that since he is the only male Compson left at home, other than Benjy, he must keep the family together at all costs.
As different as all three of these narrators are, and the vastly different way they interact with the other members of the Compson family, we see many of the same themes. We are able to see how Family honor, guilt, and time greatly affect each character in their own way
...re the reader is not able to make any solid connection with any of these characters. It is arguably only through the stories foreshadowing where both authors prepare us with little details like the mileage of the car written down by the grandmother in O’Connor’s story likewise the boys preparation of the stones in Jackson’s Lottery that would inevitably help the reader to comprehend how both these author’s reached the horrifically shocking climatic endings in both short stories. I believe the authors similar use of these three variables help the reader to understand the message being delivered through these stories of the human condition and its effects on a society that only embraces its traditional moral beliefs and values.
War and Grief in Faulkner’s Shall Not Perish and The Unvanquished. It is inevitable when dealing regularly with a subject as brutal as war, that death will occur. Death brings grief for the victim’s loved ones, which William Faulkner depicts accurately and fairly in many of his works, including the short story “Shall Not Perish” and The Unvanquished.
Another link between these three characters is their family ties. They highly regard their elders, and consider the effects of the decisions they make on t...
The old saying “The South never dies” appears to be all but accurate in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Each member of the Compson Family is practically a contrary of old southern ideals and beliefs. Caddy’s promiscuity, Benjy’s mental disability, Jason’s vulgar attitude towards his family, Quentin’s crooked obsession with Caddy, Ms. Quentin’s rebellious attitude due to her own upbringing, and Mrs. Compson’s ability to see her children as punishments from God; they all diverge from an idyllic well-ordered Southern family. Mr. Compson was the only member who managed to held on to his Southern Morality for the most part, only straying from the norm after the death of his son, Quentin. Each character in their own way depicts how old Southern ideals of gentility have begun and continue to dissolve.
William Faulkner was a well-esteemed author of the 20th century who used many literary techniques to display messages in his writings. In his short story, A Rose for Emily, he used literary tools such as point of view, physical plot structure, and symbolism to develop his theme that the past is always wound into the present.
The book is so well written it can be read in many different ways, as I have mentioned. In the first chapter we get hints as to all of them and the ambiguity of the story starts as early as chapter 1, giving the reader different paths to read the story, in different ways.
The symbols, themes, and overall mood from each of these stories were great influences on the overall similarities between each story. The meanings of all of the items they held, their transition into adult hood, and the analyzing of their pasts in hindsight makes each story very similar to one another and thus gives reason for comparison. This journey that each of these children went on was a last taste of innocence before hitting the harsh true world of adulthood and the journeys that they went on will also be attributed with the great memories they provided for each of these characters, much like in real life.
Some similarities are obviously that they are both slaves who are trying to escape their misery. The characters also have a good relationship with their fathers because they taught them how to care for themselves and what to do when they need
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).
One that stands out is their different ways of thinking. In the beginning of the movie, Temple states, “I think in pictures”(Jackson, Temple Grandin). Not only does she think in pictures, she also connects them and judge people and things based on her picture web. For example, when she sees the automatic sliding door, she is afraid to enter it because she connects it to the guillotine (Jackson, Temple Grandin). This greatly affects the way she judge objects and people. On the other hand, although Christopher has a film-like memory, he doesn’t use it in his thinking. Christopher thinks in patterns. He has an obsession with prime numbers (Haddon 11), he calms himself by doubling numbers and doing quadratic equations in his head (163), and he believes that seeing yellow cars mean bad days while red cars mean good days (24) not because it is logical but to maintain a pattern in his daily life. Their difference in thinking affects how they respond to situations, their perspectives, and also their
By focusing on the figure of Caddy, Bleikasten’s essay works to understand the ambiguous nature of modern literature, Faulkner’s personal interest in Caddy, and the role she plays as a fictional character in relation to both her fictional brothers and her actual readers. To Bleikasten, Caddy seems to function on multiple levels: as a desired creation; as a fulfillment of what was lacking in Faulkner’s life; and/or as a thematic, dichotomous absence/presence.
The Unvanquished is composed of a series of stories during which Bayard Sartoris, the narrator, grows up from a twelve-year-old boy to a young man of twenty-four years. The narrative style makes it obvious that events are being related by an adult who is looking back at his past. There are several indications of this: in the very first story “Ambuscade”, the narrator, while describing his war games with his coloured friend, Ringo, states: “We were just twelve then”. (5) He tells the readers how they fantasized about the military exploits of John Sartoris, Bayard’s father, seeing them as heroic and exciting adventures. The narrator describes himself and Ringo at this stage of the novel as “the two supreme undefeated like two moths, two feathers riding above a hurricane” (7), drawing attention to the fact that while the two boys are positioned in the midst of war with all its attendant destruction and insanity, they have no understanding of its horror.
...hey affect the lives of the women around them, yet somehow do not change to a great extent throughout the plays. On the other hand, both characters are comparable in that their eventual fate could be argued as being in many ways as a result of their own deeds and possibly the strains of society.
Tragedy is an ever present part of life, whether it be illness, inability, death or anything else, it takes its toll on everyone. A very common tragedy found in literature and daily life is the loss of dreams, in Langston Hughes’s poem “A Dream Deferred” Hughes poses the question of what truly happens to a deferred dream: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up… Or fester like a sore… Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over...Or does it explode?” The outcome of lost dreams differs for each individual and their attitude. This is seen throughout America and also in The Sound And The Fury by William Faulkner and The House On Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros.
Born on September 25, 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, William Faulkner was an American author who made readers understand the Southern life. His parents, Murry and Maud Falkner, named him after his great grandfather, William Clark Faulkner (William Faulkner: Olemiss). Faulkner‘s mother taught him what was right from wrong, to be loyal to one’s family, and the politics of sexuality and race, which would later be written about in some of Faulkner’s works (William Faulkner: Olemiss). Faulkner was a high school dropout and only attended one semester of college at the University of Mississippi, but he was still able to become a well known author (William Faulkner: Olemiss). Faulkner was famous for displaying the South’s culture and the faults in society (William Faulkner: Biography). The famous novelist’s struggles in the early years of his career, his inspiration of his home, and his legacy that impacted are what make William Faulkner one of the most memorable authors in American history.