Trauma Studies In Faulkner’s War Fiction

William Faulkner is one of the most famous writers in the20thcentury. His novelshave been studied extensively in China and abroad from the aspects stream ofconsciousness, modernism, feminism and Southern literary canon. This dissertationhas applied trauma theory to explore the trauma themes in Faulkner’s war fiction,which is a new aspect of the research. This paper makes a review on the developmentof trauma theories at first, and then analyzes Faulkner’s five novels Soldiers’ Pay,Sartoris, Absalom, Absalom!, Light in August and A Fable in three chapters from theangle of war trauma, to discuss the features of war trauma on Faulkner’s charactersand its grim aftermath as an unwanted legacy that continues to inflict pain on them intheir later lives.Besides the Introduction and Conclusion, this dissertation consists of threechapters. The first chapter seeks to find out the representation of war trauma inSoldiers’ Pay and Sartoris. Severely traumatized by the First World War, the veteransMahon and Sartoris are disabled to fit themselves into the post-war life. They areregarded as war heroes when coming home, but the civilians are really indifferent totheir lives, so the veterans choose to live silently or behave grotesquely as a result oftheir deep physical and mental traumas. Speechless behavior is one of the responsesof Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which is called the major trauma to war veterans.Chapter Two aims to explore the heritage of war trauma on people from the homefront in Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August. These two novels trace the AmericanCivil War events and the subsequent war trauma left directly to Sutpen and Rosa, whohave experienced the Civil War, and indirectly to Quentin, Hightower the priest andMiss Burden, who have inherited the inter-generational trauma from theirgrandparents and parents. During the Reconstruction of the South, they have nochoice but to immerse themselves into the failure of the old glories and live in anisolated world of themselves, without any possibility to heal or alleviate their psychological trauma. Trauma and memory repeat in itself and pass on to the latergenerations.Chapter Three concentrates on Faulkner’s A Fable. Faulkner spent nine years toaccomplish this novel in order to cast a retrospective look on the World War I anddisclose the war trauma on the generals and soldiers alike in the battles, whateverroles they assume, playing Christ or playing Satan. These soldiers are war victims aswell as war witnesses.Based on the study of trauma theory, this dissertation has discussed therepresentation, heritage and retrospection of war trauma in the above five novels. Webelieve that trauma studies, as a relatively new literary critical theory can bring newlight to the interpretation of classical as well as new writers, and lead, hopefully, tonew insight in the scholarship. The process of discussion covers Faulkner’s life-longworks, but makes especial studies on his early novel Soldiers’ Pay and his late novel AFable, which have attracted less attention among Faulkner scholars in the past. Wartrauma offers one aspect of studying Faulkner’s novels, but does not exhaust thesources of the traumatic lives of his characters.