William Faulkner
(1897-1962)
"The past is
never dead; it's
not even past."
Source of His subject matters
"[I] discovered that my own little postage
stamp of native soil was worth writing
about and that I would never live long
enough to exhaust it, and that by
sublimating the actual into the apocryphal I
would have complete liberty to use
whatever talent I might have to its absolute
top. It opened up a gold mine of other
people, so I created a cosmos of my own."
- WF
The setting of most of his works
• In the American South, with his emphasis
on the Southern subjects and
consciousness. Subject matters from a
small region in Northern Mississippi,
Yoknapatawpha County which is actually
an imaginary place based on Faulkner’s
childhood memory about the place where
he grew up, the town of Oxford in his
native Lafayette County.
Yoknapatawpha Kingdom
• With his rich imagination, Faulkner turned
the land, the people and the history of the
region into a literary creation and a
mythical kingdom. The Yoknapatawpha
stories deal, generally, with the historical
period from the Civil War up to the 1920s
when the First World War broke out, and
people of stratified(分层次) society, the
Yoknapatawpha Kingdom
• aristocrats, the new rich, the poor white,
and the blacks. As a result,
Yoknapatawpha County has become an
allegory or a parable of the Old South, with
which Faulkner has managed successfully
to show a panorama of the experience and
consciousness of the whole Southern
society.
Invention and experimentation in
form and narrative technique
• A man with great might of invention and
experimentation.
• Novel as an art form ; evolved his own
literary strategies .
• Primary duty :explore and represent the
infinite possibilities inherent in human life.
• Writer should observe with no judgement
whatsoever and reduce authorial intrusion
to the lowest minimum.
Narrative techniques
• never step between the characters and the
reader to explain, but let the characters
explain themselves and hinder as little as
possible the reader’s direct experience of
the work of art.
• The most characteristic way of structuring
his stories is to fragment the chronological
time. Juxtapose the past with the present.
stream-of consciousness technique
• to emphasize the reactions and inner
musings of the narrator.
• the interior monologue: to explore the
nature of human consciousness
• presenting multiple points of view , gave
the story a circular form , one event is
centered, with various points of view
Quentin
radiating from it, or different people
responding to the same story.
Caddy Banjo
• symbolism and mythological and
Jason
biblical allusion
Dilsay
Style
• long and embedded sentences, complex
syntax
• vague reference pronouns
• a variety of “registers” of the English
language
• syntactical structures and verbals
paralleled, negatives balanced against
positives,
Style
• compounded adjectives swelling his
sentences,
• complex modifying elements placed after
the nouns,
• sound very casual or informal sometimes
• capture the dialects of the Mississippi
characters, including Negroes and the
redneck, as well as more refined and
educated narrators like Quentin.
• symbols and imageries drawn from nature
Achievement
• Winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize
• regarded as an important interpreter of the
universal theme of "the problems of the
human heart in conflict with itself."
• experimented in the use of stream-ofconsciousness technique and in the
dislocation of narrative time.
• discusses issues of sex, class, race
relations, and relations with nature.
Primary Works
• The Marble Faun, 1924; Soldier's Pay, 1926;
Sartoris, 1929; The Sound and the Fury, 1929;
As I Lay Dying, 1930; Sanctuary, 1931; Light in
August, 1932; Doctor Martino and Other Stories,
1934; Pylon, 1935; Absalom, Absalom!, 1936;
The Unvanquished, 1938; The Wild Palms, 1939;
The Hamlet, 1940; Go Down, Moses, 1942;
Intruder in the Dust, 1948; Knight's Gambit,
1949; Collected Stories of William Faulkner,
1950; Requiem for a Nun, 1951; A Fable, 1954;
Big Woods, 1955; The Town, 1957; The
Mansion, 1959; The Reivers, 1962.
Study Questions
"A Rose for Emily"
1. Discuss the ways in which
Faulkner uses Miss Emily's house as
an appropriate setting and as a
metaphor for both her and the
themes established by the narrative.
2. What are the different uses of the
themes of "love," "honor," and
"respectability" in the story?
3. Why does Faulkner use this
particular narrator? What do you
know about him? Can you list his
"values," and if so, are they shared
by the town? Is this narrator
reliable? Does the fact he is male
matter?
4. Many critics have read Miss Emily
as a symbol of the post-Civil-War
South. Discuss the advantages and
disadvantages of adopting this
stance.
5. Those of you who have read
Charles Dickens's Great
Expectations will see a
resemblance. How does Faulkner's
tale echo but also differ
significantly from Dickens's?
6. How does this story handle the
linked themes of female oppression
and empowerment? What does it
say about the various kinds of
male-female relationships in
American society of this period?
A brief introduction to the story:
• A Rose for Emily is Faulkner’s first short
story published in 1930. Set in the town of
Jefferson in Yoknapatawpha, the story
focuses on Emily Grierson, an eccentric
spinster who refuses to accept the
passage of time, or the inevitable change
and loss that accompanies it. Simple as it
is in plot, the story is pregnant with
meaning. As a descendent if the Southern
aristocracy, Emily is typical of those in
Faulkner’s Yolnapatwpha stories who are
the symbols of the Old South but the
prisoners of the past. In this story,
Faulkner makes best use of the Gothic
devices in narration, and, the deformed
personality and abnormality Emily
demonstrates in her relationship with her
sweetheart is dramatized in such a way
that we feel shocked and thrilled as we
read along.
Explanation of the meanings of the
natural paragraphs
• I. 1. The story started with the description
of the states of the minds of different
people at her death.
• 2. The description of her house and
neighborhood.
• 3. (Flashback) When she was alive, she
had been a tradition, a duty, and a care..
She got the special privilege not to pay
taxes from the old leader of the town.
4. (Flashback) New leaders asked her to
pay taxes.
5. (Flashback) New leader sent men to call
on her and ask her pay taxes.
6. (Flashback) Appearance of Miss Emily—
very fat and dressed in black: an image of
old or pastime and color of horror.
7-14 (Flashback) Her attitude toward the
deputy—obstinately refuse to pay anything
and drive them out of the door completely.
II. (Flashback even further)
• 1. She seldom went after her sweetheart’s
death and refuse any visit.
• 2-10 A terrible smell issued from his house
and the neighbors complained to the
leaders of the town, and the leader
thought it not proper to tell that, so men
were sent to put down the smell secretly
on a night.
• 11.The men were frightened by her image
at he window and ran away.
•12.(go back further to her youth when her
father was alive) Emily dressed in white,
color of innocence and pure, behind her
father, her father drive away all the suitors
so that she lost the chance of love and
marriage.
13. The death of her father left her poor.
14. People wanted to offer condolence and
aid, but she refused and kept her father’s
body for three days at home, then buried in
hurry.
15. People seem to understand her strange
behavior to do that.
III. She tried to start a new life after
her father’s death by marrying Homer
• 1. She took on a new image when she
appeared again in the street after her
fathers death—like a angel.
• 2. She fell in love with a Northerner
named Homer Barron, a foreman of roadbuilding workers and driving in art with him.
• 3. Different reactions about her date with
Homer and her relatives were called to
remind her of her behavior.
The inherited manners of her
father
• 4. Old people talked about her behind her
back and thought she had morally fallen.
• 5. She paid no attention to others and as
dignity and doggy as she bought the
poison, arsenic.
• 6-14. A description of the procedure of her
buying arsenic.
IV. From her purchase of the poison
until her death 40 years later
• 1. People thought she would kill herself if
Homer refused to marry her.
• 2.Some ladies worried her driving with
Homer in the streets would be bad for the
young and asked the minister to stop it,
but useless.
• 3. Her cousins were asked to stop it, but
Emily was found to prepare stuffs for
marriage.
4. Homer had gone when the road finished
and came back when Emily’s cousins left.
People thought he would get married with
Emily and take her away.
5.Then Homer never appeared again, and
Emily stayed at home; the terrible smell
issuing from her room.
6. Her image changed when she was seen
again—fat with grey hair.
7. Her front door remained closed, she
gave painting lessons to colonel Sartoris’s offsprings and get free taxes.
8. She lived in the past, refusing the
development of the society.
9. Door closed and taxes refused to pay
even the new leaders demanded again and
again, she could only be seen through
windows, like the carved torso of an idol in a
niche.
10-11 (Back to the present) she fell ill and
died, only her Negro servant with her. Her
room filled with dust and shadow. (Gothic
atmosphere)
V. She was a murder.
• 1. The Negro open the front door after her
death and let ladies in and then
disappeared.
• 2. On her funeral, old men wore
Confederate uniforms to show respect, the
monument of old collapsed. Old people
tend to remember the old happy days.
• 3-4. The mythical room upstairs was
discovered to be the bride chamber full of
dust and everything of the wedding night
remained untouched.
(Compare it with Charles Dickens's Great
Expectations, Miss Havisham, a rich
woman who was once cheated and
betrayed and deserted by her lover on the
very eve of their wedding, her expectation
is to bring up Estella as a beautiful, coldhearted weapon of revenge upon all male
folk in the World;)
5. Homer lay dead in bed.
6-7 Emily slept with Homer’s dead body
for many years.