A Research Into Postmodernism In Faulkner's Novel Absalom, Absalom!

William Faulkner is a most famous modernist writer in American literary history, however, this thesis points out that Faulkner applied some postmodernist techniques in his masterpiece Absalom, Absalom !. In this sense, Faulkner is also a postmodernist writer. The Annual Faulkner Conference of 1999 celebrated in Faulkner's hometown is entitled "Faulkner and postmodernism", which impels people to study his postmodernism as a forerunner. Early in the 1930s, before postmodernism began to show its inkling in the 1940s and 50s, Faulkner had experimented his pioneering thoughts and skills full of the postmodernist conceptsin his works.This thesis makes a rough comparison between modernism and postmodernism. The biggest difference between them lies in the degrees to which modernists and postmodernists make formal experiments in their writing. This can be seen in the two slogans respectively offered by the modernists and postmodernists. The former chant "Make it new"; the latter dramatize "Make it strange". The one word change reflects the postmodernists' radicalness in their formal experiments: they cherish the spirit of "Everything goes."And this thesis points out three features of postmodernism: (1) the principle of indeterminacy is salient in postmodernist writings. This is because postmodernists are skeptical about the transparency of language, the organic universe, and the knowability of the world; (2) the postmodernism has no intention to conceal its doubts on the authoritative discourse in the text, and the fight against fatherhood as a kind of authority is shocking readers' minds; and (3) many postmodernists, especially metafictionists, stress their concern with language and story-telling process, "the reality" or "the world" acquires a problematic status in their writings. Instead of trying to represent or reflect "the reality", they seek to reveal fiction as fiction.The Southern and Faulkner's own backgrounds together with his unceasing experiments make it natural for him to accept the above postmodernist ideas and techniques and practice them in his works. This especially can be traced in his masterpiece Absalom,Absalom !'. In this novel, Faulkner manifests the postmodernistideas and techniques through the following methods: (1) there is no determinacy in this writing we can see bifurcating plots, open endings, figure-like characters, fragmented narration, etc., that all point to indeterminacy; (2) masculine identity is viewed as a kind of authoritative discourse in postmodernist writings; males struggle to let society acknowledge their own identity through their whole life's hard work. But they cannot realize what they actually pursue. That is the tragedy of Sutpen, whose death is the symbol of the death of fatherhood; (3) numerous possibilities have joined the "narration plane" to constitute the "meta-fiction".This novel can be found to own earlier postmodernist thoughts and techniques under intensive reading. These postmodernist features result in textual instability and disintegrate into a form of deliberate unreadability, which necessarily attracts readers to deconstruct the novel and rebuild it with their own tastes or favors to a new higher level. So this novel reflects Faulkner's ahead-of-time consciousness and a high sense of social responsibility. In this sense, Faulkner could be glorified as one of the founders of postmodernism who pushed forward the rise of postmodernism. It is beyond question that Faulkner is esteemed to be the master of American literature.