William Faulkner

1897-1962

Life

Family

Works (As Published)


 

Issues and Themes

     The old South, the new South, the reconstructed South--if it has to do with the South, Faulkner wrote about it.  Few other writers had the understanding of Southern social structures that he had.  We see the theme of the South, not only individuals in the South, but entire social classes groups and families in the South, in almost all of Faulkner's work.  Every theme in Faulkner relates back to the South in some way.  If he is talking about a child, it is a child in the South.  If Faulkner is writing about social structure, racism, class, anything, you almost always find his theme within the context of Southern America.
    Because of the concentration of Faulkner's subjects, we must view his own upbringing to understand him to the fullest.  He was raised near Oxford, Mississippi, deep in the heart of (surprise, surprise) the American South.  In the earliest of his writings, he wrote mostly poetry that The Norton Anthology of American Literature calls "a melange of Shakespearean, pastoral, Victorian, and Edwardian modes with an overlay of French symbolism and T.S. Eliot" (2031).  It was at the suggestion of Sherwood Anderson that Faulkner started to use his upbringing ( specifically the South) as a source of topics and to create his own style of writing.
    The South is a place where community and social structure influence a person's life heavily.  Faulkner, from his own Southern upbringing, understood this and used this theme over and over again in his work.  We can see it miles away in "Barn Burning."  The family ties, the social classes, the workings of the system--we experience it all in this story.  Within the context of about twelve pages we gain almost a complete understanding of how many people (mainly poor white sharecroppers) in this time period viewed themselves, oppressed, how they viewed those above them as the oppressors, and how they viewed those below them (mostly black ex-slaves) in this set social structure, which they felt like they could not break out of.  Faulkner's work was really sociologically groundbreaking literature in this way.  Never before had someone been able to so accurately reflect the social structure of the south in this post-Civil War time period.
    Faulkner's work was groundbreaking not only sociologically, but also psychologically.  The inclusion of a character's thoughts, reported in a passive manner by the narrator, basically Faulkner, was a great touch to his work.  This style of narration, called stream of consciousness, allows readers to experience what it was like to be a person living in this time period. We gain a greater understanding of the story through the character's own eyes; we are able to get inside his or her deepest thoughts and feelings.
     Faulkner even dealt with the politics of the South, social evils and the like.  For example, Faulkner was not a racist person, which doesn't surprise us now, but was quite a shock to the structure of the South in his time.  He dealt with the issue of racism and race in the social system partly as brief comments in his stories.  Basically informative, these comments made no general statements about the morality or immorality of racism; that's just the way it was.  We can see examples of this in several of Faulkner's works.  We see it in "Barn Burning," where all the black people portrayed were servants and viewed as inferiors.  This view was probably quite accurate for the South during this period.  We see a little more morality in "That Evening Sun"; the main character is black and a servant, but we can see her thoughts and feelings, and we view her as a real person.  Also, the youngest character in the story, a boy named "Jason," repeats throughout "I'm not a nigger, I'm not a nigger" not in a mean-spirited way, but in a that's-how-things-are way.  To me this is a social statement tucked away in the ramblings of a child about how the racist system, if left alone, was self-perpetuating because children saw adults serving them and viewe> 

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ecause of the changing social structure, his work became more and more anti-racist.  In a major work of social criticism, he won the 1950 Nobel Peace prize for his anti racist story "Intruder in the Dust."
    Faulkner was lucky to have been internationally acclaimed before his death.  People respected his work and used it as a model to follow.  For example, he was incredibly functional in literary movements in France.  Faulkner had something to say, he said it well, and he said it beautifully, and people recognized it, and that's why he remains so popular, even today, more than thirty-five years after his death. 

 

Work

"Barn Burning"


 

Bibliography


Written and designed by Jillian Haugen, John Isenhour, and Jason Odum, students, University of North Carolina at Pembroke, 1997
Edited by Mark Canada, Ph.D., professor of English, University of North Carolina at Pembroke

© Mark Canada, 1997
 

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