Family Relationship And National Identity In William Faulkner's Later Works

The later part of William Faulkner's literary career,covering exactly two decades ranging from 1942 to his death in 1962,demonstrates a somewhat different representation of historical consciousness and narrative techniques.The period witnesses Faulkner's creation of seven novels and two story collections,eight out of which generally plot their narratives centering on characters'kinship in the South.Those fictional works cultivate,in depictions of family genealogy and individual memory of the past,those key southern family members who cast a backward glance over history,bewildered in social reality,and construct a promising future identity.This dissertation takes as research object six novels Go Down,Moses,Intruder in the Dust,Requiem for a Nun,The Town,The Mansion and The Reivers,together with two story collections Knight's Gambit and Big Woods.Within the theoretical framework of narratology combined with a critique of social history,this dissertation engages in a close reading of the target texts,plus several essays and public addresses published and delivered in this period,and aims to analyze the general theme of family vicissitude and its formal features.It probes further into the imagined national identity of characters and to find out its implication and metaphorical meaning therein.This dissertation reads the texts as family romance,both a narrative mode and a literary motif.Two objectives are to be achieved.For one thing,the family memory and social ties exert many-folded effects upon identity construction against a larger picture of kinship and vicissitude among families.More historical as well as cultural factors are taken into consideration in the investigation of diverse attitudes towards family inheritance.For the other,it remains with a subjective construction of national identity to those characters in Faulkner's later fiction who,on the basis of social changes prior to and after World War II,balance the provincial culture and national identity from the shared tangency and balance of family and nation.As a result,the American cultural imprint could betray itself in Faulkner's profound concern of human fate.Faulkner's later fictional works carry further the theme of and his well-practiced writing techniques in the former period.Family remains always as a significant topic and incorporates the historical consciousness of different characters into social realities outside.Faulkner brings to life,via the vehicle of romance,the complicated kinship and social changes of the southern community.Family romance in the later fiction shows strong features of local color in which the southern as well as national culture is balanced when characters construct their own national identity.Meanwhile,Faulkner repeats his skilled practice of stream-of-consciousness narrative techniques and plots his story world with romance at center with diversified realist narrative techniques,achieving thus higher popularity and practical significance among audience.The dissertation works beyond the dualistic paradigms of white-black race and rich-poor class to invesitgate the common features emphasized by characters of different gender,races and classes.In different works,both major and minor characters are likely to change their narrative positions frequently,fortifying in a way the unity of Faulkner's novels.Such a situation reflects the profound changes outside in the Southern society which break,in the proof of social mobility,the common myth of closed community in stetreotyped thinking.Those characters in Faulkner's later novels and stories juxtapose southern history and social reality and crave for ideal future in between.In a similar way heterogeneity was found in the texture of family kinship where an optimistic sense was to hint at the existance of the living force in it.Such an integration of different attitudes to time shows positive strength to betray the utopian sense of the constructed future prospects in the author's mind,achieved in turn from their insistent lingering upon the past of both family and Southern community.