Analysis Of Memory And Time In Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Even we live in the moment. It’s also a scene of crossings, bridging past and present. People struggle ahead but often obsess themselves with the past and present.

To say the past never dies is to say the past is always relevant, and to say the past hasn’t even passed is to say the past is relevant today. It’s fair to assume Faulkner’s words were meant to evoke the idea that the lessons and contexts of our history often impact the decisions we make today.

In relation to time, Mulisch demonstrates that wars and hidden emotions of the past prevail into a future that is not clear: “To dynamic personalities, the present is a ship that drives its bow through the rough seas of the future. To more passive ones it is rather like a raft drifting along with the tide” (151). No matter of whether the past takes a toll at a passive or active personage, no matter of whether you are controlling the boat in the “rough seas” or just passively admiring the “tide” and allowing it to control your path, the mirage of perfection in the future is not attainable without a resolution of the

William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” symbolizes the destructiveness of the human ego through the character, Abner Snopes. Throughout the story, Snopes functions and communicates based on his own logic. He has no regard for his family, superiors, or the judicial system. His unrelenting effort to live according to what he deems as “right” creates an atmosphere of fear and oppression.

William Faulkner, recognized as one of the greatest writers of all time, once made a speech as he accepted his Nobel prize for writing in which he stated that a great piece of writing should contain the truths of the heart and the conflicts that arise over these truths. These truths were love, honor, pity, pride, compassion and sacrifice. Truly it would be hard to argue that a story without these truths would be considered even a good story let alone a great one. So the question brought forward is whether Faulkner uses his own truths of the heart to make his story "Barn Burning." Clearly the answer to this question is yes; his use of the truths of the heart are prevalent

A person’s life can be summed up within a sentence, their childhood just a word. Time has the interesting ability of warping. At the same time, it has the ability to take away sentiment from any event.

actions to show that no one will own or control him. He has no regard

In, A Rose for Emily, Faulkner uses the element of time to enhance details of the setting and vice versa. By avoiding the chronological order of events of Miss Emily's life, Faulkner first gives the reader a finished puzzle, and then allows the reader to examine this puzzle piece by piece, step by step. By doing so, he enhances the plot and presents two different perspectives of time held by the characters. The first perspective (the world of the present) views time as a "mechanical progression" in which  the past is a "diminishing road." The second perspective (the world of tradition and the past) views the past as "a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from

In William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the image of honeysuckle is used repeatedly to reflect Quentin’s preoccupation with Caddy’s sexuality. Throughout the Quentin section of Faulkner’s work, the image of honeysuckle arises in conjunction with the loss of Caddy’s virginity and Quentin’s anxiety over this loss. The particular construction of this image is unique and important to the work in that Quentin himself understands that the honeysuckle is a symbol for Caddy’s sexuality. The stream of consciousness technique, with its attempt at rendering the complex flow of human consciousness, is used by Faulkner to realistically show how symbols are imposed upon the mind when experiences

Time is something that humanity has not been able to conquer. Specifically, John Niles says that “time and an indifferent fate blot out even the most glorious of human achievements.” He means that one person’s accomplishments and material rewards will eventually be forgotten over time and thus mean nothing. This concept of time as an eraser can be seen in both Beowulf and “The Wanderer” where the past is diminished into a shadow of what it once was before eventually being forgotten.

William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer, born on September 25, 1897 in Oxford, Mississippi. He died on July 6, 1962, of a heart attack. Faulkner is credited with many literary works including novels, short stories and poetry. He had a tendency to focus his writings on families, time, sex, the past and the south where he was born. He created voices for children, criminals, the mentally unstable and the dead (Faulkner, 2013). In Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” he elucidates the effect of time versus tradition and looking at the world in a vividly obscured view through symbolic representations anchored to a rose and a house.

The main theme of the Faulkner's short story is the relationship between the past and present in Emily Grierson, the protagonist. She did not accept the passage of time throughout all her life, keeping everything she loved in the past with her.

After the Civil War, the American Southerners had a strong trauma that could not be forgotten. Considering that William Faulkner was also one of these Southerners, approaching to his texts through a psychoanalytic lens would be a meaningful work. In fact, Faulkner is one of the rare writers who faced Southern racial ‘taboo’: the miscegenation. In addition, a Southern Renaissance that what Faulkner does with the South through his novels are very similar with what Freud did with the European civilization after the World War I in his work about ‘psychoanalytic mourning’ (Lee 229). Actually, Faulkner went through the World War I just like Freud did and he is one of the “Lost Generations”: a group of writers who were strongly affected by the inhumanity of war. Thus, this essay will focus on analyzing Faulkner’s “The Bear” in psychoanalytical view.

In his novel The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner uses Benjy’s narrative to show that the past dominates the present, as Benjy’s past constantly intrudes upon the present through his memories.

Bakhtin's “chronotope” is a narrative time concept underlining that time cannot be understood without a spatial dimension: time and space are interconnected. In Greek ‘chronos’ means time and ‘topos’ means place. Bakhtin wanted to find a chronotope in different literary genres, which gave characters most freedom and creativity. Chronotope (space-time) bridges plot and narrated events with the real world. He called the lived time as- real time, historical time or horizontal time. In the historical time, the experience of the individual flows on with every new piece of information brought up by history. Time and again, the past is integrated in the current moment of consciousness. A chronotope plays a significant role in texts to expose the nature of events and actions and exemplifies the texts relation to their social and political sphere.