A Mediator Between The Old And The New

William Faulkner, though being the author of altogether 18 novels and three volumes of short stories and the Nobel Prize winner in 1950, received a quite belated recognition from the public. Up to now, critics have been showing an everlasting interest in yet quite controversial attitudes towards Faulkner's works, and many readers have found it difficult to understand his works. The diversity of attitude and the difficulty of understanding are to a great extent caused by the lack of knowledge about Faulkner's writing materials and more importantly, his writing techniques.Since it is all clear that most of Faulkner's novels are drenched with the ambience of the mystical piece of land of the American South, this paper, after making a general introduction of the then south, mainly focuses on various literary techniques Faulkner employs to show the decaying old South. Aimed at helping understand Faulkner's works and better appreciate his art of fiction, this paper makes a close study of some works of Faulkner from a thematic and technical point of view and discovers the somewhat rebellious side of William Faulkner as a modernist writer. He doesn't reject the traditional writing techniques as most modernist writers do. Instead, he innovatively combines traditional techniques with modern ones in his writing. Most important of all, through a detailed analysis of Faulkner's writing techniques, this paper comes to the conclusion that Faulkner's innovation and the uniqueness of his writing techniques mainly lies in his selective inheritance of the traditional techniques and the creative application of the modern techniques.