Carnival Of Perspective William Faulkner

Being a highly innovative and multi-faceted modern writer, William Faulkner displays a facility of getting into and revealing the minds of his characters freely meanwhile leaving no sign of his presence as an author in the novels. He also shows his talent in exposing the deformation of things in a funny and ritualized way. Faulkner has produced works of diverse sorts, ranging from the most grotesque folklore-like comedy to the most solemn tragedy involving complicated and subtle philosophical thinking. The funny and the serious have dominated his style either together or alternatively. Rabelais's respect for the natural being and Dostoevsky's meditation over the mental being of individuals in suffering are symmetrically combined in Faulkner's works. With a somewhat deliberate ambiguity and complexity in writing, Faulkner has erased the boundaries between the sneering and the serious, the natural and the thinking, the imaginary and the real by creating a metaphorical, if not factual, image of the American South. The long-existed Dualism in the South is put into question by Faulkner when he presents to his readers the in-between figures ---figures cross biological or moral lines. His doubt on the absolute hierarchies in the South is apparent as he lets the extremes come together and achieve a harmonious co-existence. Nothing is absolute in his fiction. Everything is ambivalent and in constant changes. Faulkner's characters often appear contradictory with dual natures---angel and temptress, black and white, etc. The racial structure of white and black established in the Southern society is thus put in close scrutiny. Faulkner's Southern background has given him both the knowledge about and the insight into the root of many tragedies and vices in the South. It also makes him aware that the solution can only lie in a reconciliation of the opposites, now that it's virtually impossible to make an absolute distinction between the white and the black, the angel and the whore, the rational and the mad. Faulkner uses dialogue as a means to reconcile these opposites and by smashing down the walls erected between hierarchies and closed consciousness, he reconstructs a South of his own, the Yokanatapapha in dialogue. Dialogism is typical of Faulkner writings. By putting one into another's view, Dialogism absorbs diverse voices, notably the marginalized. Besides dialogism, which is taken as the most powerful weapon of Faulkner in fighting with authority, change and regeneration constitute another important aspect of his strength. All his writings seem to be revealing the same notion that change and regeneration are more inevitable and significant than stability and eternity.This dissertation attempts to use Bakhtin's Carnivalesque theory to observe the above aspects of Faulkner's fiction. Besides its role as a significant critique theory, Carnivalesque also offers a special perspective on the world. The elementary concepts composing this theory like grotesque body, duality, regeneration, dialogue cover most of the controversial issues in Faulkner's works. They take us from the outward to the inward of his texts, leading us to a thorough investigation into his subtexts. Being a mosaic-like theory, Camivalesque can be used to interpret texts of different styles, including the most serious and the most funny like Dostoevsky's and Rabelais's novels. In Faulkner's texts Carnivalesque is represented differently, too. Some of them reveal Carnivalesque traits explicitly in the funny language and the grotesque body, others bear them in the polyphonic structure. Despite the distinction in representation, a Carnivalesque way of thinking and a Carnivalesque attitude toward the world is universal in Faulkner's fiction.Aiming to explore the Camivalesque nature of Faulkner's writings, this dissertation consists of five parts. Part one gives an overall introduction of Carnivalesque theory. Part two illustrates the grotesque and funny nature of Faulkner's rural world. Part three focuses on the in-between figures in Faulkner's novels. Part four discusses the dialogic nature of some of his major novels. Part five draws a conclusion on the aesthetic meaning created by the Carnivalesque perspective.