1
Old and New South in
The South and the Fury
-William Faulkner's tragic depiction of the corruption of the Old South aristocracy in the post-Civil
War world is ranked a masterpiece for its style and themes. He was particulary interested in the
decline
/propast/
of the Deep South after the Civil War
. Many of his novels explore the deterioration
/određivanje/
of the Southern aristocracy after destruction of its wealth and way of life during Civil War
and Reconstruction.
Stilistically, Faulkner used stream of consciousness, interior monologues, dicontinuous time,
fragmented chronological order, multiple narrators, complex allusions, and allegory.
-The novel set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, which is populated with the sceletons of
old
mansions and
the ghosts of
great men
, partriarchs and
generals from the past
whose aristocrstic
families fails to live up to their historical greatness.
He explores Southern memory, reality, and
myth, with the focus on honor and sin as seen through the tragic decline of the Compson family.
Beneath the shadow of the past grandeur,
these families attempt to accept old Southern values
,
codes, and myths that are corrupted and out of place in the reality of the modern world
. The
families in Faulkner's novels are rife
/mnogobrojne/
with failed sons, disgraced daughters, and smoldering
/tinjajuća/
resentments
/ri'zentment-ogorčenost/
between whites and blacks in the aftermath of African-American
slavery.
-The novel tells the story through four different viewpoints: the three Compson brothers –Benjy,
Quentin, and Jason – and their black servant Dilsey.
-
The Civil War shattered
/razbiti, slomiti/
the Southern genteel
/đen'ti:l-otmen, uglađen/
tradition
, with its emphasis
on male responsibility to defend female honor, purity, and virginity – in short, the female reputation.
-The whole book tells about
downfall one rich and intellectual family
. They are
not noble
at all. They
are
a poor family
who came to the South and cheat Indians and took piece of land. The reason of
downfall is multiplex. There is a strange economic position in South after war. But he wanted to
describe the
lost of love
and that we can not live without it.
Compsons are doomed to be destroyed
because of lack of love. Father turned to alcoholism losing the social and the phisical position, and
land. In book, it's about lost of mother, she couldn't love anybody, not even her husband and
children.
-Caroline Compson
, the mother,
changes her son's name from Maury to Benjamin
. She didn't want
for her idiotic son to have the name of her brother. She wants to be rich and noble so Compsons
sold
the Benjy's pasture to sent her oldest son Quentin to Harvard University
. Harvard University is nice
sounded to her so she intends to gain better reputation for her family by it.
-The novel is also celebrated for
innovative use of time
:
time is variable
rather than constant,
personal
rather than objective. They all brothers have problem with time unlike Dilsey who has no
problem with it.
-
Benjy
's narration is like eye-camera. He cannot distinguish between the past and present and thus
has no fixed idea of time
because he is an idiot.
-
Quentin
was very intellectual but he killed himself because
„he can't live in the world that he is now.
You can't kill time.“
He is afraid of his sexuality so he thinks of castriating.
He
attempts to escape
time's grasp by breaking his
watch
,
but its ticking continues tu haunt him afterward. The watch is a
gift from his father and it constantly reminds Quentin of the glorius heritage of his family. Watch's
ticking symbolizes constant passage of time. He is obsessed by time and thus imprisioned by his
memories of the past, which drive him to suicide. For him,
only past exist
, so that could be one of
the reason for his death.
2
-
Jason
reject the past, his heritage, to embrace
/im'brejs-zagrljaj/
the present and the future in his obsession
with money. He is depicted as the most terrible character because he steels Caddy's money for
Quentin. He wants to be Northern, to lives in moder way, so he even bought a car. He is obsessed by
proper behaviour, by convections; he wants to look as a gentleman but he couldn't succed.
-Only
Dilsey
understands the family's insignificiant place in the inexorable
/in'eksrbl - neumoljiv, nepopustljiv/
march of history. She is an American black servant (the main character) but in the book she is the
only „positive character“. She's only who remembers Benjy's birthday, buys him cake and takes him
to black church. She also loves
Caddy,
who becomes promiscuous and gave birth to an illegitimate
daughter Quentin. Her father, Mr. Compson is indifferent to Caddy's promiscuity unlike Quentin, her
brother, who is in despair over Caddy's sin by drowning himself in the Charles River. Mr. Compson
dies of alcoholism.
Miss Quentin
grows up to be an unhappy, rebellious, and promiscuous girl.
-At the conclusion of the novel
, Dilsey
is the only loving member of the household, the only
character who
maintains her values without the corrupting influence of self-absorption
. She thus
comes to
represent a hope for renewal of traditional Southern values in an uncorrupted and
positive form. Dilsey is what Faulkner sees, South of Compsons that will be venished.
-
The shadows
, seen in first and second chapeters, imply that the present state of the
Compson
family
is merely
a shadow of its past greatness
. Shadows serve as a subtle reminder of the passage
of time, as they slowly shift with the sun through the course of a day. Quentin is particularly sensitive
to shadows, a suggestion of his acute awarness that
Compson name is merely a shadow of what it
once was.
-Lack of love must produced those situations.
-In this novel,
Faulkner explores how the Compsons, like the Old South they symbolize, lost touch
with the new realities of the modern world, becoming ineffectual, loveless, and corrupt.
