Absalom

In the The Sound and the Fury, each member of the Compson family has polarizing character traits that contribute to the family dysfunction. Quentin (III), the eldest child of Mrs. Caroline Compson and Mr. Jason, is highly sensitive and the most intelligent member of the family. A overarching theme in the novel is the desire and the attempt to control the uncontrollable, especially with men trying to control the sexuality of a woman. The topic of this novel is Caddy’s sexuality and each of the…

For the lava time; An argumentative essay on the shaping of characters due to the use of time and memory. In William Faulkner’s novel, The Sound and the Fury, the Compson family struggles through life’s numerous challenges of a mentally disabled child, death, and reputation. Time and memory captivate the minds of many of the characters, but these concepts also cease to exist in the minds of other characters. William Faulkner uses many themes throughout his novel in order to create a…

Absolutism in a Changing World Henry Adams, a Pulitzer prizing winning historian and author, once said “Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man” (Adams). Adams argue that though man attempts to conform nature to fit a sense of order, the chaos inherent in nature will always remain. This pursuit for order can be seen in man’s micromanaging of time and attempts to use science to control nature, such as genetic engineering. However, this perpetual pursuit of order counterintuitively…

In his classic novel The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner artfully depicts the tragic downfall of the Compsons, a once elite, aristocratic, white Southern family. Seeking to unveil the tumultuous emotions and thoughts within his characters’ minds, Faulkner narrates his story from the perspective of the three Compson brothers (Benjy, Quentin, and Jason), along with a final section using a third-person point of view. With this structure, Faulkner explains the boys’ utter obsession with their…

In The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner introduces us to the Compsons, a white Southern family living in post-Civil War Mississippi. The family is comprised of an alcoholic father named Jason III, a neglectful, hypochondriac mother named Caroline, and their four children. The Compsons have three sons: Quentin the eldest, Jason IV and Benjy the youngest, who is also severely mentally handicapped. In addition, there is a daughter named Candace, also called Caddy, who does not have her own…

The theme of time is deeply rooted in its structure and characters. Faulkner discovered that time exceeded the objective. Time and subjectivity fuse together the known past with the unknown future to create a moment of the present. This idea led to Faulkner’s complex deployment of flashbacks within the flow of consciousness and his reliance of the repetition of these flashbacks (Walker 493-495). Faulkner not only incorporates time in structure and characters, but he also incorporates his own…

Living between 1897 and 1962, William Faulkner passed after a literary career marked with many influential books in the Western canon. Based around the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi, Faulkner’s work captures the essence of the deteriorating Southern-American aristocracies and lifestyle in the wake of the Civil War. Blending masterfully with intricately designed thematic elements, Faulkner executed experimental writing techniques that strayed from traditional form, commonly…

William Faulkner is a Southern writer who, in work after work, has gone back to the same inexhaustible source; the American South, its disturbed present and its tormenting past. In Absalom, Absalom!, his greatest and most rewarding literary work, he devotes his mature powers to a full spectrum examination of main's reliance on the past and of the extent to which man is responsible for the past. His strong condemnation of the values of the south emanates from the actual story which Quentin tells…

consciousness author (Ross). Both Conrad and Faulkner liked to go about their writing in a poetic manner. The sacrifice of proper grammar and concise descriptions for long sentence structure packed with compound adjectives gives the reader a sense that Absalom, Absalom! is a “prose poem of magnificent complexity” (Johnson, Kalmanson, 18). An example of this being his description of where the “dim hot airless room” that Rosa was telling Quentin the story (Faulkner, 1). His purpose of the lack of…

his life, “Little,” “Chiron,” and “Black.” They portray his childhood, teenage years, and adulthood respectively, each with large gaps of time not shown or explained between each part. This technique reminded me of the gaps readers must fill in Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury.…