Word: faulkner
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Told by an Idiot. In The Sound and the Fury, which many critics call his greatest book, Faulkner examined the aimlessness, moral impotence and sense of doom that he saw afflicting many of the old established Southern families in the first third of this century. The events are simple enough, though the stream-of-consciousness telling makes them often difficult to follow. Of the four children in the aristocratic Compson family, the boy Benjy is an idiot, the girl Caddy gets pregnant, marries the wrong man, and goes away, the boy Quentin commits suicide in an inflexible rejection...
Only the old Negro servant of the family, Dilsey Gibson, can be seen as whole and fully human. Some have found Dilsey heroically simple to the point of sentimental caricature of the "black mammy." Faulkner clearly intended her as a celebration of the quality of Negro endurance that survives with dignity in the Deep South. She is also the book's moral norm, against which the reader measures the decline of the Compsons into drunkenness, hypochondria, idiocy, promiscuity and suicide. Through the three decades spanned by the novel, Dilsey Gibson, with her strength, patience and honesty, is the only...
Crisis in the Flesh. Faulkner's developing alarm over the grim daily realities of race in the present-day South was best demonstrated in three notable character portraits (one Negro, two white) he painted in Intruder in the Dust, which was his first novel in seven years when it was published in 1948. Lucas Beauchamp (rhymes with reach 'em) is what the local whites violently resent as a "damned high-nosed impudent Negro." As the book opens, he is about to be lynched for murdering a white man. He proves himself a model of imperturbable courage that...
Lawyer Gavin Stevens, whom Beauchamp calls on to defend him, is the very picture of the well-meaning but ineffectual white moderate who is reluctant to act on his convictions. Faulkner's belief that the coming generation carries the burden and opportunity of reconciliation is personified in Chick Mallison, the white lad who digs up the evidence that clears Beauchamp. Chick is torn between the tradition that expects him to hate Beauchamp for his prideful independence, and his own grudging, slowly growing respect for Lucas as a man. More explicitly than any other of Faulkner's books, Intruder...
Walked Off the Page. But Faulkner is finally relevant not narrowly to the Negro problem in the South but to the white problem-the ills of the entire society and way of life he writes about. In his Snopes trilogy, starting with The Hamlet, he turned to another aspect of that society, telling of the grimly independent small white farmers and the rise of that perfectly unprincipled man Flem Snopes...