Prayer in William Faulkner's Light in August Essays

This piece is a simpler one based off of the concept that words are unfulfilling to the concepts they represent. In As I Lay Dying, Addie states that words are “just words.” Addie developed a disdain for words as she slowly got more cruel the longer she remained trapped in this family. In a certain passage from As I Lay Dying, Tull and some locals are talking with Cash about Cash’s broken leg. Faulkner gives us two different conversation one is boring and mundane and is the one that was actually spoken, while the other is rich in content and opinion, a much more interesting conversation to have, but is only the thoughts of the men. The words spoken were not the true thoughts of the men and the men hold back their thoughts because they are very

Langston Hughes gives us the perspective from his thirteen-year-old self. He gives the reader a good idea of the feelings he’s having and the moments he is witnessing before being “saved” by the congregation at the church his aunt attends. In his story we get feelings of uncertainty, worry, anticipation and the loss of whatever faith he might have had before going to church. Hughes’ mood surround his story and helps us in some way feel the way he’s feeling. Language in a story, like this one, helps get a visual or maybe a more vivid visual of what is going on. To have that visual, you can imagine yourself in his place and just feel his emotions. This helps bring a story to life. The reader is creating the movie version of the story in their

Ezra Faulkner believes that everyone has a tragedy waiting for them, a single moment after which, everything that really matters will happen. After his personal tragedy he realizes that the things people expect of you aren’t always the things that make you happy. Ezra finally understands that he always talked about being popular but deep down was so tired of it and he found himself when he became friends with other people in his school. In this book, social classes play a huge role, this is shown numerous times throughout the novel. Some of the most notable times are when Ezra finally realizes that he is no longer popular, nor was he happy being popular, when Ezra begins mending his relationship with Toby, and throughout

Southern Gothic frequently depended on the conviction that day by day life and the refined surface of the social request were delicate and fanciful, camouflaging aggravating substances or curved minds. Faulkner, with his thick and multilayered composition, generally remains outside this gathering of experts. In any case, "A Rose for Emily" uncovers the impact that Southern Gothic had on his written work: this specific story has an ill humored and denying climate; a disintegrating old manor; along with rot, festering, and grotesquerie. Faulkner's work utilizes the shocking components to highlight an individual's battle against an abusive society that is experiencing fast change. Another part of the Southern Gothic style is appointment and change. Faulkner has appropriated the

"Things usually work out in the end.""What if they don't?""That just means you haven't come to the end yet." -Pg 259 | I really love this quote. I ponder that it can mean a couple different things, but most of all that we choose our “endings”. That if we aren't satisfied with what our lives have come to be, we can always change that until we are happy with

"To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.” ~Samuel Butler

“Humankind has been sustained not merely by its intelligence, but by its capacity to hope.”

       "Blood" is considered by many to be one of the most important ties between human

Garreau emphasizes this scenario by quoting Faulkner’s famous saying that “man will prevail ‘because he has a soul, a spirit capable of passion and sacrifice and endurance’” (qtd. in 209).

In William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Faulkner portrays the death of Addie Bundren and her family's quest to honor her dying wish to bury her in the town of Jefferson. Faulkner utilizes humor in the novel to lighten the mood of death and as an act of transgression against the orthodox Christian views of death as it relates to good souls dying and becoming angels. Addie Bundren’s son, Vardaman, relates to the orthodox Christian views of death, and the synonymous use of humor with these views ultimately creates an idea about humanity’s perception of death and how they should live, which is enhanced through John Morreal’s “Humor in the Holocaust: Its Coping, Criticizing, and Superiority” and “‘The Abject’- A Brief Definition.”

Faulkner’s works consisted of many dark touchy topics such as war, racism, mental illness and suicide in all of books, short stories, William Faulkner wrote about almost every part of life, from something that could be absurd at his time, to something real like racism in the American South. Throughout his life, Faulkner was kind of a rebel, notorious for his confidence, drinking, and he would often make up stories about himself. Faulkner wrote from experience and as a person who lived in the south during times of racism, he wrote about a lot of things in the south. To be exact his specific genre or style in which he wrote in is what some call “southern gothic”. Southern gothic is a unique style of writing and only expressed by very few authors. These stories usually take place only in the south and have darkness to them. His stories would use irony to examine the values of the American south. Instead of solely trying to add suspense with the style it is also used to explore social issues and cultural character of the south. Which leads me to one of Faulkner’s first important novels “Sartoris”. In Sartoris Faulkner focuses on a family during the world war era in the south. In the book the Sartoris family is one of the more important families in Yoknapatawpha County where the book is set. The Old Colonel, John Sartoris, represents an old and dying out order dating back to the mid 1900’s. His world revolves around his plantation home, his slaves and his

There are several ways in which William Faulkner's short story "Barn Burning" is indicative of literary modernism. It depicts a relevant historical period and is part of the frontiersman literary tradition (Gleeson-White, 2009, p. 389). The author utilizes a number of purely literary approaches that were innovative for the time period in which the tale was originally published (in 1932), such as employing a young child as a narrator complete with misspelled words and broken, puerile thoughts. However, the most eminent way in which this story embraces the tradition of literary modernism is in the author's rendition of dynamic social conventions that were in a state of flux at the time of the writing. Specifically, his treatment of race is the inverse of how race is generally portrayed in American literature prior to the early part of the 20th century. An analysis of this integral component of "Barn Burning" reveals that Faulkner's unconventional rendering of African American characters in a desirable social status particularly as compared to that of the Snopes clan is crucial to this tale's inclusion as part of the tradition of literary modernism.

William Faulkner was said to be one of the best Southern Gothic writers and the Southern Gothicism was brought about by Edgar Allen Poe in 1839. His novels and short stories such as Absalom! Absalom! (1936), The Sound and the Fury (1929), and “A Rose for Emily” (1930) were of the Southern Gothic genre. This paper will discuss what Southern Gothic is and its characteristics, along with William Faulkner and how Faulkner’s work conforms to the Southern Gothic genre.

In the novel Light in August, Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden are extremely damaged individuals. Both characters were raised in turbulent environments with an emphasis on religion. The sins they committed had a profound impact on them. They knew that their behavior was wrong but they were compelled to continue. Religion became a mental prison for them. A prison that they created but that they would never escape alive. Although Joe and Joanna viewed religion in completely different ways, they both lacked the capacity to forgive themselves because of their upbringing.

William Faulkner’s unconventional writing style is widely renowned for his disregard of literary rules and his keen ability to peer into the psychological depths of his characters. His novel As I Lay Dying is no exception to his signature style. This book sets forth the death of Addie Bundren, her family’s journey through Yoknapatawpha County to bury her with her relatives in Jefferson, Mississippi, and examines each character in depth from a variety of perspectives. While this journey wreaks havoc among members of the family, As I Lay Dying serves as a dark reminder that life is to be lived and that happiness is within reach.