The Meaning Of Time In The Sound And The Fury

William Faulkner is one of the most important writers of America in 20th century, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. The Sound and the Fury is the most favorite novel of him. Studies on him and his novels are flooding during the past decades, but seldom have explored time issue in his novels. My thesis begins with time conception, and studies the meaning of time in The Sound and the Fury by stream of consciousness, multilevel disordered time structures, and its symbolization.Time is an old but new philosophic question; many philosophers and scientists have studied on it during the history. First of all, this dissertation lists the development of time conception in physical and psychological aspects, emphasizing on Bergson's time theory. He considers that psychological time is real time, which is duration and fluidity; people achieve real time only by intuition. This time notion greatly influenced Faulkner's time notion. Faulkner's modern time notion comes from these theories and directly contributes to his creations. The Sound and the Fury is such a novel fully embodies his time notions. Bergson's time fluidity and duration theory intermingle the present, the past and the future, or even to say, the present contains the past and the future. Stream of consciousness matches such time sense, so Faulkner adopts stream of consciousness to depict his characters. This dissertation analyzes three main characters'consciousness and summarizes their different time notions and stream of consciousness traits. At the same time, this time theory leads to the multilevel disordered time structure of this novel, so in the following part this dissertation analyzes this structure features within each four narrators, and educes the unique...