An Analysis Of Family Relationships In Faulkner's Three Novels

William Faulkner is a distinguished American novelist in the 20 th century. Family fictions are his important art achievments. This thesis aims at exploring factors attributed to disharmonious relations in families by a close examination of the domestic relationships depicted in his three important family novels:The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom! and As I Lay Dying.The thesis is composed of six parts. The Introduction reviews the writer and his three novels and summerizes previous research on family relationships in Faulkner's novels. Compared with the earlier studies, which foucsed on single relationship or one novel, this paper makes attempts to analyze diverse relationships in three novels in terms of Southern historical and cultural backgrouds.Chapter One surveys the Ethical Literary Criticism, which is widely employed to interprete ethical phenomena presented in literary works from the perspective of history. Meanwhile, through consideration of contemporary political, economic and social factors, this method is utilized to examine the relationships among people, people-society relationships, and people-nature realtionships. Besides, this chapter retrospects the historical and cultural backgrounds of the South briefly.Chapter two, three and four, the main body of the paper, focus on the mother-children relationships, father-son relationships and relationships among siblings in the Compsons, the Sutpens and the Bundrens. This part endeavors to trace causes of the tragidies of three families, such as mother-son alienation, father-son conflicts, brother-sister incest and fraternal rivalry.The last part concludes that the discordant relationships result from five factors:the disintegration of Southern plantation economy, the Puritanism womanhood, patriarchy, racism and slavery. Family is society in miniature; therefore, the corruption of family ethics to some extent reflects historical and social maladies in the South, and indicates the downfall of the South of the United States.