The Beauty Of Silence

The Sound and the Fury wins great honor as well as severe criticism for its author, William Faulkner. While critics exclaim at his astonishing technical innovation and his ingenious handling of different narrations, many of them also criticize him on his characterization of the heroine Caddy because Faulkner keeps her absent as a narrator. Some assert that Faulkner discriminates women. Upon such an argument this thesis puts forward a different viewpoint. It argues that Caddy's absence as a narrator embodies profound aesthetic connotations. Two procedures of completing the novel are to be considered, one is the creation; the other is the reception. Upon the creation procedure, Caddy's silence is analyzed through both conscious and unconscious texts. In the conscious text, Caddy's absence is appraised to be the sensible arrangement in accordance with Aesthetics of Form while in the unconscious text, Caddy's absence is estimated, in conformity with Psychological Aesthetics of Literary and Artistic Creation, as the projection of the author's perplexity with women. Upon the reception procedure, Caddy's absence is viewed as a blank to constitute the appealing structure that invites readers'participation. In short, Caddy's absence is an aesthetic phenomenon that demonstrates the beauty of silence.