William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer. He is also a Nobel Prize Laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. William Faulkner is known for his short stories, novels, poetry, screenplays, a play, and essays. Primarily, he is known for his short stories and novels. His novels and short stories are based on a country called Lafayette Country and set in a fictional country of Yoknapatawapha.
William Faulkner is among the most celebrated writers in American literature, mainly Southern American literature. Falkner started publishing his work in 1919. Most of his works got published during the 1920s and 1930s; however, he became renowned with the publication of Malcolm Cowley’s The Portable Faulkner. He won the Nobel Prize in 1949 and became the only Mississippi-born Nobel Prize winner.
His two works, A Fable published in 1954 and The Reivers published in 1962, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His one of the best works include The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!.
A Short Biography of William Faulkner
William Faulkner was born on 25th September 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi. He was named after his paternal grandfather William Clark Falkner who was an intelligent and adventurous man who was shot dead seven years before the birth of William Faulkner.
The grandfather of Faulkner spent his life as a financier, soldier, businessman, farmer, politician, lawyer, and best-selling author. He had written The White Rose of Memphis.
Along with Faulkner’s grandfather, his grandmother, Lelia Butler, and mother Maud, also inspired him greatly. They both were voracious readers, painters, and photographers. Both of them have thought of Faulkner the beauty of color and line.
The caretaker of Faulkner was a black woman named Caroline Barr. She also influenced him greatly in his life. In his documents, Faulkner has pointed out to Barr as motivation and spurred in him a fascination with politics of race and sexuality.
Faulkner started drawing from his teenage years. He also enjoyed writing and reading poetry. He started imitating the Scottish romantics by the age of 12. He was highly intelligent; however, he did not take an interest in school and did not earn any high school diploma. Faulkner worked as a clerk and carpenter in the bank of his grandfather.
Faulkner was greatly impressed by Estelle Oldham. After her engagement, Faulkner turned to a new mentor Phil Stone. Phil Stone was greatly impressed by his poetry. On the invitation of Stone, Faulkner shifted to New Heaven, in Connecticut and started living with him. Stone nurtured his passion for writing.
While working on Prose, Faulkner started working at the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. In 1918, he joined the British Royal Flying Corps, tempted by the war in Europe. He was trained as a pilot for the Royal Canadian Air Force.
In 1919, Faulkner attended the University of Mississippi. He started writing for the Mississippian, a student newspaper. In this newspaper, he submitted his first published poem and short fiction. He dropped out after the three semesters. He then worked as an assistant to a bookseller in New York City. He also worked as a postmaster for university.
In 1924, Faulkner’s collection of poetry The Marble Faun was published by Phil Stone. Afterward, Faulkner shifted to New Orleans, where he published numerous essays for the magazine named The Double Dealer.
Faulkner published his first novel in 1926 named Soldier’ Pay. In his stay in Paris, where he shifted in 1925, he wrote about the Luxembourg Gardens.
On the advice of his friend Sherwood Anderson, an American writer, Faulkner started writing about his native region of Mississippi. He developed many great characters based on his encounter with the real people of his native town.
Faulkner developed a fictional Yaknapatawpha Country for his most famous novel, The Sound and the Fury, published in 1929. In 1930, Faulkner published As I Lay Dying.
Celebrated Author
William Faulkner soon became famous for his accurate and faithful dictation of Southern speech. He also focuses on the social issues that had been left untouched by many American writers. He talked about Southern Aristocracy, slavery, and “good old boys” club. In 1931, Faulkner published the story “Sanctuary” based on the kidnapping and rape of the young woman Ole Miss. In 1950, Faulkner published a sequel that contained play forms and prose named Requiem for a Nun.
When Estelle Oldham divorced from his husband Cornel Franklin, Faulkner and Estelle married within the next six years. In 1931, Estelle gave birth to a daughter Alabama. The baby died after one week. A collection of short story titles as These 13 is dedicated to Estelle and Alabama.
In 1932, Faulkner published Light in August.
Faulkner started screenwriting after publishing several celebrated books. Faulkner co-wrote To We Lived in 1933.
In 1933, he also sold the right to film Sanctuary when his father died in need of money. The film was later titled The Story of Temple Drake. In the same year, Jill was born. Jill was the only surviving child of them.
Faulkner also published several novels in his career as a screenwriter. These novels include Absalom, Absalom Go Down, Mosses, and The Hamlet.
The critics and readers interested in the works of Faulkner were revived when in 1946, Malcolm Cowley published The Portable Faulkner. In 1949, Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was regarded as one of the most important writers of American letters. It was this attention that bought him more awards. He won a National Book Award for his short story collection The Collected Stories of Faulkner, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and National Book Award for his novel A Fable.
On 6th July 1962, William Faulkner died of a heart attack. He died on the date of the birth of his grandfather.
William Faulkner’s Writing Style
William Faulkner is among the most challenging American writers of the twentieth century. He is known as a novelist of great importance. His novels are exclusively celebrated for the narrative technique he has employed in his works. The narrative techniques he employed have been welcomed as visionary par excellence. He uses the technique of stream of consciousness in his works.
Besides novelist, William Faulkner is also equally known as an American Historian. He has earned a distinction to be the first American novelist to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Being a modern novelist, William Faulkner records the history of the American South. His short stories and novels are filled with themes reflecting the significant issues of his time. The themes he talks about include slavery, civil war, and class conflict. The writing of William Faulkner is responsible for bringing the attention of the world to American doors.
The works and, more precisely, the novels of William Faulkner are characterized by the “loose” forms of the panoramic Victorian novels during its development; for example, the novels of Charles Dickens.
Faulkner’s novels and short stories feature the juxtaposition of attitudes, voices, narrative lines, emotional tone, and mode of representation. The Following are the detailed characteristics of William Faulkner’s writing style.
Narrative Technique
The works of William Faulkner is known for his experimentation with the narrative style of stream-of-consciousness. The stream-of-consciousness technique is characterized by the imitation of thoughts. While describing the inner thoughts of characters, the writer often eliminates the formal sentence structure and conventional rule of grammar. This helps to create a more organic and creative mode. The narrative technique becomes complex and based on complex and long sentences.
For example, the stream of consciousness narrative technique present in the novel Absalom, Absalom!:
“Her voice would not cease; it would just vanish. There would be the dim coffin-smelling gloom sweet and oversweet with the twice-bloomed wistaria against the outer wall by the savage quiet September sun impacted distilled and hyperdistilled, into which came now and then the loud cloudy flutter of the sparrows like a flat limber stick whipped by an idle boy…”
Besides Absalom, Absalom!, the novels The Sound of Fury and As I Lay Dying also exclusively employed the narrative technique of stream-of-consciousness. The novels are based on the narration of the first and third-person point of view.
Even though the narrative style of William Faulkner in his short stories is not the typical stream-of-consciousness, as found in his notable novels, his stories are based on the narrative style of his novels. For example, there are extended details and descriptions, action in a scene recalling a past of future action, and complex sentence structure.
The different narrative and stylistic techniques employed in his works at different points have a purpose. The psychological complexity of the characters of stories and settings is reflected through narrative devices.
Naturalistic Prose Form
For much of his works, William Faulkner used more conventional or naturalistic prose forms. His short stories and novels are a combination of stream-of-consciousness and naturalistic prose. For example, A novel A Light in August employed naturalistic prose and also combined the stream-of-consciousness narrative form.
Descriptions
The depth of his characters and scenes is established by using the effective way of employing long and lengthy descriptions. In the works of William Faulkner, the object’s description is followed by the character’s description. The result of this the object and character as described in a similar way takes on each other’s appearance.
For example, at the beginning of a short story “A Rose for Family,” William Faulkner gives a description of Grierson house as
“It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street.”
Following the description house, Faulkner then gives the characteristic details of Miss Emily. The “heavily lightsome” description of the house parallels the description of the physical appearance of Miss Emily.
For example, the skeleton of Miss Emily is small and spare, like the lightsome of the house. Moreover, the house and the woman were entirely inseparable from each other. Now both are dead. The woman is literally dead, and the house is figurative. However, in their death states, the house and the woman are described in similar ways. Miss Emily died with her gray head placed in a yellow and moldy pillow with a lack of sunlight. Likewise, the house is full of dust and shadows.
The “yellow and moldy with age that lacks the sunlight” stylistically describes the house, Miss Emily, pillow, and all the ruins of the past.
Unique Juxtaposition of Past and Present
Faulkner also used extended description in the short story “That Evening Sun.” the first two paragraphs of the short story describes Jefferson’s town in the present time and in the past. The short story’s first paragraph is one long sentence portraying the present condition of the town. For example:
“Monday is no different from any other weekday in Jefferson now. The streets are paved now, and the telephone and electric companies are cutting down more and more of the shade trees: the water oaks, the maples and locusts, and elms to make room for iron poles bearing clusters of bloated and ghostly and bloodless grapes…”
Like the first paragraph, the second paragraph is also one complete long sentence. The sentence portrays the past of Jefferson. For example:
“But fifteen years ago, on Monday morning the quiet, dusty, shady streets would be full of Negro women with, balanced on their steady, turbaned heads, bundles of clothes tied up in sheets, almost as large as cotton bales, carried so without the touch of the hand between the kitchen door of the white house and the blackened washpot beside a cabin door in Negro Hollow.”
With the lengthy description of Jefferson and town, William Faulkner juxtaposed these two paragraphs and established a recurrent theme in his short stories: the difference between the past and the present and how this difference affects people in various ways.
As many of the stories of Faulkner juxtaposed past conditions with that of the present and employed jumping between the two different time spheres, a unique narrative technique is needed that would apparently unite one scene with that of others.
To solve this problem, Faulkner makes an action or object in one scene triggering another action in which the same action or object is present. For example: in the short story “A Rose for Emily,” the attempt of an alderman to collect the taxes of Miss Emily triggers the narrator to recollect a scene from the past – almost 30 years ago. In the scene, the neighbor of Miss Emily is complaining that her property smells and wants the fathers of the city to solve the problem.
The two scenes are linked simply by employing the verb “vanquished.” As the narrator says: “So she vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell.”
Complex Sentence Structure and Complexity of Thoughts
William Faulkner is well-known for his stylistically complex sentence structure. The complicity of sentence structures parallels the complexity of the thoughts of his characters. For example, in the short story “Barn Burning,” Sarty Snopes is uncertain between doing what he feels is right and being loyal to his father. In this conflict, Sarty culminates to warn Major de Spain that his father will burn the barn of major.
It is after the warning of Sarty and his run towards the barn of the major that the narrative complexity of Faulkner becomes evident. This short story is the best example of the complexity of narration and sentence structure. The third last paragraph of the story is centered on the running of Sarty, and the last sentence of the paragraph appears to be sunning on and on. The sentence is read as;
“So he ran down the drive, blood, and breath roaring; presently, he was on the road again though he could not see.”
The blindness of Sarty is coupled with his loss of hearing. He appears to be caught up in the contradictory loyalties. He temporarily loses his senses for being guilty of disloyal to his father.
In addition to this, William Faulk also focuses on the psychological instability of Sarty in this scene. He employed descriptive terms that suggest the increasing confusion of Sarty. As the horse of de Spain thunders by, Sarty is “wild” with grief even before he hears the gunshots. After hearing the gunshot, he starts crying automatically to his father and then starts running. By employing the verb, “run” William Faulkner intentionally intensifies the scene. He quickens the pace of the scene by using the words with an “ing” ending. For example, he writes:
“running again before he knew he had begun to run, stumbling, tripping over something and scrabbling up again without ceasing to run, looking backward over his shoulder at the glare as he got up, running on among the invisible trees, panting, sobbing, ‘Father! Father!’ “
The sentence is building faster and faster until it ends in a desperate cry of Sarty for his father. He fears that his father has been murdered. The increasing concern for the safety of his father is reflected through the increasing intensity of the sentence.
Conclusion
The greatness of Faulkner lies in his style. The way Faulkner adjusts his style to fit into the subject under narration is remarkable. Faulkner can easily adapt a more conventional writing style as easily as he invented his own writing style in the form of complicated narrative techniques. For example, in “Spotted Horses,” Faulkner employed an Old Southwest humor. No matter what writing style Faulkner chooses to write, the complexity of his style parallels the complexity of his characters; therefore, it gives a unique characteristic to his writings.
