Stream of Consciousness in Faulkner’s Absolam, Absolam!
While I was reading Absolam, Absolam! I was reminded once again of Faulkner’s particular writing style of stream of consciousness. The book itself is laid out very confusing having multiple narrators depicting incidents of the past, a recurrent theme of Faulkner’s identifying man’s connection to his past. The first narrator of Absolam, Absolam is Rosa, the sister in law of Thomas Sutpen. She describes Sutpen with so much hatred that he almost takes form of a monster, which is incapable of feelings. Interestingly, Rosa is telling her story to Quentin Compson, the second narrator from The Sound and the Fury, who later as we know commits suicide. At the end of the first chapter, I was left with many pieces of what seem to be the tragic story of Thomas Sutpen, a man who mysteriously shows up in Jefferson, Mississippi buys one hundred acres of land and turns it into a plantation. We also know that he becomes married to Ellen who is twenty-four years older than her younger sister Rosa. The final image of Sutpen given by Rosa is that some black man kills him on his plantation. Rosa also asks Quentin to come with her to the old Sutpen mansion, because she thinks someone is hiding out there.
Continuing with his stream of consciousness technique, Faulkner has Mr. Compson tell the next few chapters through his memories of Thomas Sutpen. Sutpen was in the Cival War with General Compson, and as the stories have been passed down to Mr. Compson, he is passing the story now to Quentin. In Mr. Copsons version, I learned of Sutpens marriage disaster, his immediate family,his illegitimate child with a slave, and a previous marriage to a woman who was 1/8 black, who bears Sutpen a son, which is his dream, but also his downfall. He also explains, how Charles Bon, Sutpen’s abandoned 1/8 negro child comes home with Henry Sutpen from college. Later he is killed by Henry, which is not fully explained yet. I think, that there may be a connection between Sutpen’s hatred of non-whites, and the effects they have on his son, Henry.
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.
William Faulkner, an American author, wrote the novel, Light in August, in which Joe Christmas is at the center of the story. Joe Christmas is an orphan who is of biracial descent. At a young age, Christmas was adopted by a man named McEachern. When Christmas became older, he killed his father. From that point on, Christmas wandered about until he reached Jefferson, Mississippi where he fell in love with Joanna Burden, whom he also killed later on in the story. For this reason, along with numerous others, Christmas was lynched at the conclusion of this novel. William Faulkner carefully integrates several different ideas that can lead to a man’s solitude. According to the book William Faulkner by Harold Bloom, “…his fiction is steeped in the tones and emotions of the Deep South” (11). This holds true for Light in August since there is plenty of racism and hatred towards blacks. In William Faulkner’s novel, Light in August, Joe Christmas’s identity, psychological attitude, and resemblance to Christ are revealed through his isolation from society.
Emerging from and dwelling within an all-consuming lamentation, the characters of William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! enwrap themselves in a world of hurt wherein they cannot or will not release the past. Each comes to know the tragic ends of lingering among an ever-present past while the here and now fades under fretful shadows of days gone by. As the narrative progresses. the major players in this installment of Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County grow ever more obsessed by what alternative actions different circumstances might have afforded. Trapped in his/her own notions of "what might have been" (115), Miss Rosa Coldfield's wistful, yet indignant exhortation, the historicized characters of Thomas Sutpen and Miss Rosa remain fixated by Antebellum illusions--he in a desperate effort to gain what he could not, she in bitter remembrance of what had never, but might have been.
In the novel, A Light in August, William Faulkner introduces us to a wide range of characters of various backgrounds and personalities. Common to all of them is the fact that each is type cast into a certain role in the novel and in society. Lena is the poor, white trash southern girl who serves to weave the story together. Hightower is the fanatic preacher who is the dark, shameful secret of Jefferson. Joanna Burden is the middle-aged maiden from the north who is often accused of being a “nigger-lover”. And Joe Christmas is the epitome of an outsider. None of them are conventional, everyday people. They are all in some way disjointed from society; they do not fit in with the crowd. That is what makes them intriguing and that is why Faulkner documents their story.
Beloved written by Toni Morrison in 1987 and Absalom, Absalom written by William Faulkner in 1936 have similar characteristics. The two novels discuss race relations in the South and how they affect everyone involved. Beloved tells the story of an ex-slave named Sethe and her daughter Denver. They live in a house which is haunted by the ghost of Sethe’s child, named Beloved. Beloved comes back to haunt the family in human form and tries to tear the family apart. In the end, the neighborhood, who abandoned the family many years before, comes back to exorcise the baby ghost and rid the family of all of its misfortune. Absalom, Absalom is about a man named Thomas Sutpen who comes to Mississippi in search of wealth and a woman who will give
Homeless Youth: Characteristics, Contributing Factors, and Service Options. Journal Of Human Behavior In The Social Environment, 20(2), 193-217. doi:10.1080/10911350903269831
The South is tradition, in every aspect of the word: family, profession, and lifestyle. The staple to each tradition in the south, and ultimately masculinity, is to be a southern gentleman. William Faulkner, a man with the most southern of blood running through his veins, was everything but a southern gentleman.
Homeless people come from many different backgrounds. Gender is the first demographic to consider. According to many different studies, most of single homeless adults are men who “make up slightly more than 51 percent of the total homeless population, while single women comprised about 17 percent” (McNamara 1027). However, in homeless families, single female parents make up approximately 90% (Markos and Lima). Second demographic to consider is age. Everyone including children can become homeless because of different cases. From the National Coalition for the Homeless, “children under the age of 18 accounted for 39% of the homeless population, 25% of homeless were ages 25 to 34; the same study found percentages of homeless persons aged 55 to 64 at 6%” (qtd. National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, 2004). By a study in 2002 from t...
If you do not already know what homelessness means, it is someone who is not able to live in a stable residence because of financial or psychological problems, so they are forced to live on the streets or put themselves on the streets, because they feel it would be a better fit. Homelessness in Canada is a very large and concerning issue because of the growing population.
Homelessness has different meanings to different people; someone who has never been homeless might think homelessness is a person who lives on the street, in a tent or in a box. Many people don’t realize that there are a number of homeless people, who couch surf with friends, family or the ones who live in motels which are unaccountable in the numbers of homeless people. People including families with children, seniors, single parents, youths and those that are single are living in accommodations that are below standards and consider themselves as homeless.
William Faulkner’s short story "An Odor of Verbena" is the tale of a young, Southern man, Baynard Sartoris, who must come to terms with his father’s sudden (but not entirely unexpected) murder. Because this murder takes place in the decade following the Civil War, young Baynard is faced with the South’s ancient honorary code. This code dictates that, as the only son of his father, he must avenge this death. Should Baynard fail to retaliate on his father’s behalf by confronting the murderer, Redmond, who once was his father’s business partner, both Baynard and his family would lose face within their community.
In the Unvanquished, a version of southern masculinity is developed through the narrator using dialect and the device, or should I say vice of memory. Fairly early in the novel, the reflective standpoint of the narrator becomes obvious, and a certain sense of “retelling” the story, not just telling it as it happened, prevails. This use of memory is not necessarily selective but it does show the processing of perceptions of the narrator’s childhood. As readers, we first get the sense that we are hearing the story from a much older Bayard when he drops comments like “I was just twelve then; I didn’t know triumph; I didn’t even know the word” (Unvanquished 5). If he was just twelve then, he could be just fifteen or sixteen when retelling this story, assuming the grandiosity that adolescence creates, leading to such thoughts as “I was just a kid then.” However, the second part of the statement reveals a much older and wiser voice, the voice of someone who has had time to think out such abstractions as triumph and failure. Furthermore, the almost obsessive description of the father in the first part of the novel seems like the narrator comes to terms, much later in life, with how he viewed his father as a man. “He was not big” (9) is repeated twice on the same page. He was short enough to have his sabre scrape the steps while ascending (10), yet he appeared large and in command, especially when on his horse (13). The shape and size of a man being an important part in defining masculinity, I think Baynard grappled with his father’s physical presence as well as his tenuous position as a leader in the Confederate Army. Other telling moments are on page 66 when Baynard postulates what a child can accept as true in such incredible situations and on page 95 with his declarations on the universality of war. (Possibly he is an old man now and has lived to see other wars.) Upon realizing the distance between the setting of the story and age of its narrator, the reader is forced to consider how memory and life itself have affected the storytelling.
Sorte, J., Daeschel, I., Amador, C. (2011). Nutrition, Health, and Safety for Young Children. (Ashford University ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.
If someone were to ask a random person who William Faulkner was could the person tell them? William Faulkner was a well-known novelist and poet. Shaping him as a writer William Faulkner’s troubled, yet talented background, time during Great Depression, and poetry and novels made him a memorable writer.
Nyai Ontosoroh’s power only extends as far as her daughter, and her business, in society she is merely a native. As a child, Nyai Ontosorh has experienced great misery. Nya’s father sold her to a European man, Herman Mellema at a young age. For instance,