William Faulkner As A Postmodernist--The Sound And The Fury As Exemplar

As it is known to all, William Faulkner is among the most famous American Modernist writers. This thesis, however, through an examination of the social, cultural and ideological content as well as the artistic features of Faulkner's works (his masterpiece The Sound and the Fury in particular), points out that the Faulkner fiction also consists of some postmodernist features and the novelist himself may on occasions be viewed as a postmodernist writer.William Faulkner is generally accepted as a modernist writer. However, The Annual Faulkner Conference of 1999 celebrated in Faulkner's hometown is entitled "Faulkner and Postmodernism", which urges people to consider Faulkner's relations with postmodernism. Though scholars hold different opinions at this issue, few of them would deny the fact that William Faulkner was still in his most productive period when postmodernism began to show its inkling in the 1940s and 50s. It is justifiable to assume that William Faulkner, as a sensitive writer who is always eager to experiment with any new ideological and literary thoughts, would express and study the postmodernist concepts in his works.This thesis makes a rough comparison between modernism and postmodernism and points out three outstanding features of the latter school: (1) Theoretically, the postmodernist denies the "logos" center and believe in indeterminacy; (2) the postmodernism has no intention to conceal its doubts on the truthfulness of the text caused by indeterminacy, and urges the reader to participate, together with the author, in the process of creating the textual meaning, which, therefore, manifests numerous possibilities in paraphrasing the text; and (3) there exists a "meta-plane" opposite to the traditional "narration plane" to reveal its "fictionality" for the purpose of demonstrating the limitless possibilities.The special cultural background of the American Deep South, Faulkner's personal experiences and his instinctive writing tenets have made it natural for himto accept the above postmodernist ideas and techniques and adopt them in his major works. This can be seen clearly in his masterpiece, The Sound and The Fury. In this novel, William Faulkner manifests the Postmodernist ideas and techniques through the following methods: (1) there is no predetermined planning for the novel, the development of which simply follows the flow of volatile imagination; (2) there is not an organic entity throughout the novel that expresses a concrete meaning; (3) the real life at the very moment and on the very spot is grasped and expressed in some paragraphs; (4) doubtful or even negative opinions are held on whether some fixed method and angle can faithfully express the writer's intention, so it frequently narrates the same matter in different means and from different angles; (5) Numerous possibilities have joined the "narration plane" to constitute the "meta-fiction".