Absalom, Absalom! And Its Mock Heroic Style

This study focuses on Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and its mock heroic style. After an analysis of the novel's scenic narration, characterization and plot construction, the present thesis points out that with the mock heroic style as a medium to scrutinize a white Southern boy's American Dream, Faulkner comes to explore pity and sympathy, the theme of the novel.The thesis consists of five parts. Introduction in Part I first surveys the controversies in the valuation of Absalom and its style. The account of a divided tragedy of tragic action and tragic vision is argued to be flawed in two crucial ways. It not only leads critics to underestimate or ignore the comic and ironic elements in the novel, but also suggests a misunderstanding of Faulkner's motive of writing a jeremiad. As the result of a reinterpretation, this thesis proposes Faulkner's adoption of mock heroic style in the novel and its feasibility. To prove the novel's unified effect and to help readers reassess Faulkner's artistic temperament are what this study aimsat.The following three parts examine the basic elements of the mock heroic style in detail. Part â…¡ discusses Faulkner's situational jokes which contribute to the creation and evocation of a travestied world. Interwoven with farce-like scenes of funerals, marriages and activity of manhunt, these jokes summarize the characters' doomed life and ironically measure the community's degree of tolerance. Faulkner's use of dramatic settings is essentially subservient to his larger concern, that is, he is striving for a microcosm of the South with both disaffection and sympathy.Part â…¢ concentrates on the caricatures of the Sutpens and other fool-like roles who act on fantastic stages. Faulkner's meditation on the Old South and its heroism brings him to a consideration of the conflicts of giants with mere mortals hell-bent on making giants of themselves. Through caricaturization, Faulkner both makes a mockery of the constructed nature of privilege and the lack of self-knowledge of those who first suffer at the hands of society and its hierarchies and then make others suffer.In Part â…£, the collapse of the hero's grand design is explored. The mob has Thomas Sutpen as their representative dreamer who spends his life building himself a "city on a hill" and a lineage in order to attack the very system that originally excluded him. However, his design, a Puritan American Dream, starts as an innocent plan that nameless stranger should not be turned away from anybody's door, yet turns out to be its mockery in which Sutpen turns his black son away. With Supten's disillusionment, Faulkner is skeptical about the realization of any Utopian dream of building a perfect society at the cost of human feeling or sympathy.Part â…¤ comes to the conclusion that in creating a ruthless world in which all kinds of caricatures try to make heroes of themselves with a collapsed design, Faulkner holds out the possibility of damnation as well as the hope for redemption. These things he infuses with the spirit to call for "pity and sympathy" give his fiction its special place in American literature.