"The Sound and Fury"

Analytical Essay # 59187

English > Analysis
Literature
Literature > American

Provides a detailed analysis of how authorial instructions in Section 1 of American writer William Faulkner's "The Sound And The Fury" smooth the progress of the reader's mental actions.

5,000 words () | 8 sources | APA | 2002 | Mauritius

Published on: Jun 06, 2005

Paper Summary:

As a modernist writer, William Faulkner extensively makes use of and experiments with the literary technique of stream-of-consciousness. This being, by definition, "a narrative technique ... that renders the inner life of a character through an unending flow of thoughts, emotions, images, memories, and other associations moving through the character's mind." Faulkner, therefore, by making use of various narrative devices, guides the reader's imagination throughout the first section of "The Sound and the Fury" in such a way that she or he experiences the world of the thirty-three-year-old retarded narrator, Benjy, the way the latter does. This paper looks into the several authorial instructions for the production of actual sensory content, as well as into Faulkner's depiction of 'moving images,' which is often such that the process of composing the images on the mental retina is rendered less demanding.

Paper Outline
Introduction
Sensory Mimesis
Vision
Other Senses
Making and Moving Images
Conclusion

From the Paper:

""[Faulkner] always stressed the 'realness' of his characters, calling them 'flesh and blood people'... But, on the other hand, he always emphasized the artist's 'grab-bag of tools' and with that the artificiality of the character, constructed out of linguistic material." The fact is, like any writer, Faulkner has to try hard to translate the 'realness' of his characters onto paper, essentially making use of the linguistic sign. And he does that by constructing the personality and consciousness of a particular character by using specific linguistic and narrative devices. Bockting, in his article 'Mind style as an interdisciplinary approach to characterization in Faulkner', terms this narrative approach as mind style, and defines it as 'the construction and expression in language of the conceptualization of reality in a particular mind."