EXPLORING A WHOLE NEW WORLD On The Application Of The Stream-of-Consciousness Technique In Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury

As an important part of literary methods, the Stream-of-Consciousness technique has been applied by many well-known novelists and has attracted a lot of readers as well. The Stream-of- Consciousness novels stress on the inner experience of characters and reveal their feelings, thoughts, and actions, following an associative rather than a logical sequence, without comments by the author. There are three famous representatives of this technique in English and American literature: the Irish writer James Joyce, the British novelist Virginia Woolf and the American novelist William Faulkner. This thesis mainly relates the social and historical and cultural background of the Stream-of -Consciousness technique, the features of this technique and the differences between it and the traditional fictional methods. The thesis also introduces William Faulkner's life, his works and his style. Faulkner is regarded as one of the most outstanding American novelists because of his employment of the Stream-of-Consciousness technique in some of his novels, and The Sound and the Fury is said to be the first Stream-of-Consciousness novel in American literature. This thesis analyzes several fictional methods used in this novel which concern the Stream-of-Consciousness technique: multiple points of view; free association; interior monologue; shift of time; use of verse form in narrating. And for each method, the thesis discusses its features and there are some examples extracted from the novel to illustrate the employment of them. Faulkner's achievements on the Stream-of-Consciousness novels are also related in this thesis.