Much Ado About Nothing

This dissertation seeks to explore the relationship between the truth and the beholder as manifested in the William Faulkner's novel "The Sound and the Fury" from Karen Horney's psychoanalytical theory. By careful analysis of circular narrative structure of the novel, the personality and the language of the character, it tends to draw a conclusion that the truth lies in the beholder's apprehension and interpretation. Each one's response to the fact, in a sense, reveals his or her repressed feeling, or rather, the beholders give vent to his repressed feeling in their sound and fury. Their repressed feeling is originated in their childhood when their parents have rejecting altitude towards them. The children who are exposed to rejecting parental attitudes react with vague feelings of loneliness, helplessness, and fear of potentially hostile world that surrounds them. This reaction is called Basic Anxiety. He develops attitudes towards their parents that are either compulsively submissive, aggressive, or detached. These attitudes have been called neurotic trends or drives. When one predominates, the others are repressed but continue to exert a dynamic force. Their expression may alternate or be modified by traumatic external events, personal experience, cultural demands, the development of other mechanisms, or changes in the instinctual drives, particularly the sexual ones. Anxiety, then, is the mainspring from which these attitudes or neurotic trend gain their intensity and pervasiveness. The existence of such attitudes, which are simultaneously contradictory and compulsive, becomes intolerable and incompatible and creates basic intrapsychic conflict that generates further anxiety.In the novel The Sound and the Fury, the author adopts the stream of consciousness and the shift of viewpoint technique. The whole novel is divided into four sections with the three brothers telling their own story in the first three sections and the author telling the last one. While each section is centered on Caddy and her loss of virginity. But their styles are totally different. The style they adopt is closely related with their personality. Because Benjy is an idiot, his narration is rigid and objective. Quentin and Jason are all neurotic personalities. Quentin mainly adopts the strategy of resignation, while Jason adopts the strategy of aggression. Therefore their interpretation becomes a mechanism to defend against their anxiety. That is to say, they project their anxiety onto Caddy's loss of virginity. So their interpretation is highly subjective.