ABOUT THE NOVELIST
William Faulkner (1897-1962) was an American novelist , essayist , poet , short story writer and screen writer of great repute. He was born in a distinguished family in the southern state of Oxford, Mississippi and became the most distinguished novelist of American literature.
Faulkner , like many great writers in literary history, never had a formal education. He never graduated from a high school and failed in the only English course that he took. But he worked hard at the craft of writing and won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize for fiction.
Faulkner started his career as a poet but after his meeting with Sherwood Anderson, who was an already established writer, he started working on his first novel Soldier’s Pay (1926) which he later published with the help of Anderson.
Three years later, he published his most famous novel , The Sound and the Fury (1929) and became a major writer.
In 1931 , he published Sanctuary , mainly with a view of making money. The novel brought him a fortune and tempted him to write for Hollywood and make more money.
Faulkner lived and worked in his hometown and out of the environs of his hometown he created the fictional Yoknapatawpha county, a miniature representation of the southern American society. It presents a cross section of different classes of the society that suffers from moral decadence, insecurity and a guilty conscience.
Faulkner as a person was very private and avoided publicity. When he won the Nobel prize , he delivered a memorable acceptance speech in the course of which he emphasized the verities of life and expressed his conviction that “man will not endure but will prevail.”
IMPORTANT WORKS
• Soldier’s Pay (1927)
• Sartoris (1929)
• The Sound and the Fury (1929)
• As I Lay Dying (1930)
• Sanctuary (1931)
• Light in August (1932)
• Absalom , Absalom! (1936)
• The Bear (1942)
THE NARRATIVE STRATEGIES OF LIGHT IN AUGUST
A novel is a representation of life. A good novelist impose a beautiful order on discordant elements in the life and creates a work of art.
NARRATIVE STRANDS
As far as the narrative strands are concerned, the novel has three narrative strands to its account.
One is the story of Lena Grove, the other two being the story of Joe Christmas and Gail Hightower. All these stories are separate but craftfully interwoven and with the interaction with each other bring about the unity to the plot.
THE THREE PLOTS
The novel has three plots viz. The plot of Lena Grove, the plot of Joe Christmas and the plot of Gail Hightower and interestingly enough the three main characters of the three plots never meet one another.
The stories of Lena and Joe run parallel without the intersection of the two characters at any point of the story and this serves two purposes :-
i. Underlining the theme of alienation and frustration.
ii. Showing the contrast between Joe’s tormented soul and Lena’s tranquil soul.
DISJOINTED STRUCTURE OF THE NOVEL
The tension, the contrapuntal relation between a man’s private self and public role has been shown in the disjointed, fragmented structure of the novel. The novel does not have a direct narration or simple dramatization. Instead, the novel has polyphonic sections representing different narration and perspectives.
STRUCTURE BASED ON DRESSING A SHOWCASE WINDOW
Faulkner himself had said in a class conference at the University of Virginia that the structure of the novel is same as that of the principle of dressing a showcase window.
He says with regard to placing Hightower’s story at the end of the novel :-
“Unless a book follows a simple direct line such as a story of adventure, it becomes a series of pieces. It is a great deal like dressing a showcase window. It takes a certain amount of judgement and taste to arrange the different pieces in the most effective place in juxtaposition to one another. That was the reason. It seemed to me that was the most effective place to put that to underline the tragedy of Christmas’s story by the tragedy of his antithesis.”
THE NON-LINEAR PATTERN
It’s like rebuilding the different blocks into a more comprehensible structure.
The opening of the novel gives us the impression that it is Lena Grove’s story but the subsequent chapters disprove our expectations. When we began to feel that it is Byron Bunch’s story or Joe Christmas’s story we are surprised to see the shifting of focus to Hightower and then to Joanne Burden and then to flashbacks. At every turn fresh expectations are generated in our mind only to remain unfulfilled.
THE PROLOGUE/EPILOGUE EFFECT
The first chapter with Lena’s statement :-
“ My, my. A body does get around”
serves as an epilogue to the novel. This is balanced by the last chapter in which the story turns to Lena’s unhurried travel through the Mississippi of her life. And this serves as an epilogue to the novel.
BACKWARD DIRECTION OF THE NARRATIVE
From chapter 2 the direction of the narrative changes to the backward. Instead of moving forward in the storyline of Lena Grove we are propelled into backwards, towards the past through flashbacks involving Joe Christmas, Joe Brown, Miss Burden and Gail Hightower.
The SYMBOLISM OF THE BURNING HOUSE TO HIGHLIGHT THE RACIAL ISSUE
The story centres around the burning house. This house is symbolised as a place harbouring a couple of bootleggers and the lady of the house had an immoral liaison with one of them who was a half Negro.
Being a Negro had a sinister implication at the action of the story. It transpires that they are not just bootleggers but are amoral, greedy and unscrupulous.
The burning house symbolically becomes the epicentre of reflecting the racial issue prevailing at that time.
It depicts two Negros as unethical. One of them , Joe Brown, as someone who not only ditched a girl after making her pregnant but also changed his name to escape detection. The other Negro, Joe Christmas, as someone who could not live down his truth as a half white and a half black , thus , has a burning rage within him which makes him violent in the extreme, either giving pain or taking it.
THE NARRATOR AND NARRATE
From the fourth chapter of the novel Byron acts as a narrator, narrating the events connected with Lena’s arrival to Hightower.
Here, Hightower acts as a narratee representing the reader’s response and doubts.
This is another unique narrative technique put into use by Faulkner.
CHANGING TRACKS
The story of the novel takes us along with different roads with its narrative like a railway train changing its track.
CONCLUSION
The structure of the novel is circular with polyphonic narration from different point of view and flashbacks and a lot of moving back and forth suggesting a great deal in building up the narrative tension through shirt cryptic , vague and sometimes half expressed or much expressed utterances.
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