Narrative Voice In Popeye

Don’t show me, tell me; these are some of the first lines spoken by the main antagonist of William Faulkner's Sanctuary, Popeye, to the pseudo protagonist Horace Benbow. This privileging of the act of telling over showing sets the narrative direction for the rest of the novel. Faulkner’s foray in dark crime-fiction certainly eschews a ‘showing’ of the more sexual and violent details that a more typical novel in the genre would, choosing to slowly unravel details as the story progress through incomplete retellings by characters, leaving the most shocking details unsaid for the reader to piece together for themselves. Many critics such as Robert Dale Parker and Joseph W. Reed, Jr. suggest that this is a device Faulkner employs to keep the suspense …show more content…
Mary Louise Pratt in her book Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse suggests that all narration is a speech act. Pratt argues that because narratives disrupt the natural balance of a conversation by asking for audience it is a verbal utterance that creates an action. “Storytellings [...] require the consent of the nonspeaking participants,” without the consent of the audience the speech act cannot be complete as the narrator needs the audience response to the narration to complete the act. J. E. Bunselmeyer adds further distinctions to narrative as a speech act in his essay Faulkner’s Narrative Styles (Bunselmeyer, 314). He clarifies that narration differs from the recounting of events due to its intent and style. When events are reported in other styles than simple past tense they are asking for evaluation and therefore are a narration speech act. Owen Robinson uses the character of Ratliff from Faulkner’s The Hamlet as an example of this; while Ratliff’s motivation may to be to spread gossip, he is also slightly aware of the humor in his own tellings, the humor in a half-wit having the last name of Quick for