Unveiling An American Southern Myth

Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom! has always held a very important position in American literary history and attracts many critics' attention. It tells how a white poor boy, Thomas Sutpen, manages to achieve "great design", i.e., to establish a dynasty of pure white blood. In order to achieve his design, Sutpen deserts his first wife and son, brings destruction to his second wife and children, causes his one son to murder the other son and finally heads for his own doom and downfall of his dynasty. By creating such a hero, Faulkner attempts to explore the reasons of the South's failure in the Civil War and the historical sources of the existing social problems in the South.Different critics make different interpretations to the novel. In this thesis, I try to offer an archetypal interpretation to it. By comparing the parallel correspondences of some basic structures and characters in the novel with those in Greek tragedies—the Theban saga, I want to show that Faulkner adopts and presents some recurrent archetypes such as the hero archetype, the fratricide archetype, and the redemption archetype. By exploring the uses of these recurrent archetypes, I want to illustrate how Faulkner presents some eternal human conditions: love, hate, revolt, incest and fratricide in the fixed background in the American South around the Civil War. I also want to argue that, by making use of recurrent archetypes, Faulkner enables us to connect and appreciate these eternal human conditions in both the specific Southern background and some larger, more inclusive realm, reflects the continuity of human conditions in the different times, succeeds bridging his own work and the whole body human literature and thus expresses his confidence in human kind.Moreover, through examination, I want to show that Faulkner makes some displacements of the recurrent archetypes, which foreground the goal of the hero's pursuit, the motives of incest, the heroes' attitudes towards incest, motives of fratricide and results of fratricide. By the exploring these displacements in the novel, I want to argue that in Greek tragedy, the supreme will of gods plays the critical role in hero's fate, while in Absalom, Absalom!, it is racism that performs the same function...