What Is Faulkner's Loss Of Identity

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While conveying the tragic story encapsulating the inexorable loss of innocence and its multiple interpretations in The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner highlights the importance of progressivism and acceptance in response to past occurrences. Through employing the rhetoric of crots, a unique style that composes a novel through fragments in time and perspective, Faulkner emphasizes the psyche of Western culture during the progressive era through the allegory of time and memory to illustrate the cyclic reality of the struggling era; further elucidating the idea that identities influence interests, interests influence strategy, strategy influences outcome, and how outcome shifts interests which in turn shifts ideas.
Ancestral identities …show more content…
The Compson brothers’ intellectual and physical response resembles the struggling identity of those residing in a reformist era. As the fragmented perspective changes through Faulkner’s employment of crots, each character’s ultimate distortion of reality negatively affects their present, resulting in an alteration of their future. For “the sequence of events was not caused by her act – which could be responded to in very different ways – but by the significance which each of her brothers actually attributes” (279). This portrays that the essence of the novel is not the event that causes societal struggle, but the limiting dogmas that are the essence of the individual. Each perspective within the novel conclusively embodies a provisional intellectual resurrection that is shadowed by the inevitable end. While the first three chapters face the question of purity and ultimately leads to the end of the Compson family, the narrative chapter separates itself from the structure and use of crots throughout the rest of the novel. Taking an overall narrative perspective heavily influenced through Dilsey’s course of action, the final chapter of the book demonstrates the two manifestations throughout the intellectual process of interests and outcome: a cyclic reality leading to an eventual end, or allowing the outcome influenced by the individual’s strategy to then influences their ideas. As the servants and Dilsey …show more content…
His use of crots and fragmented perspective further illustrates the consecutive struggle during one of the many American social revolutions. The purpose of Faulkner’s novel is “to make the question of form and technique an unavoidable critical issue” (Study 278). Throughout her analytical process, Olga W. Vickery emphasizes the Faulkner’s attempt to synthesize the psyche of Western culture during the progressive era and to portray the physiological and psychological manifestations of post-war trauma and psyche through the individual perspectives of the Compson family, and the internal and external consequences of residing in past ideologies as opposed to advancing into new principles. As The Sound and the Fury was published in 1929, writers in the modernist movement criticized material wealth and societal customs while overcoming the ideologies behind the civil war, and challenging modernism as well as creationism. Faulkner uses time and the perspectives of the children to emphasize the integral element of the novel: they are only able to reflect back in time and will forever recapitulate past occurrences. The obstacle blocking their individual abilities to progress is their inability to allow the outcome to shift their interests and, in turn, shift their ideas. This results in their despair and limiting
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