A Biblical Archetypal Study Of The Sound And The Fury

William Faulkner is one of the most influential writers in the American south literature. Since he wined the Nobel Prize for literature of 1949, he has gained more and more criticisms. But most of them work from perspectives of racial ideology, multiple-narrative methods or psychological analysis of Faulkner's works. However, the studies about the Biblical archetypal analysis of Faulkner's works are fewer than the former ones. Nurtured in western mythical literature, William Faulkner resorts to mythology to find a place where the American southerners who got lost in the social values could go. Faulkner's consciousness of mythology is a main factor of his creations and also a main factor that moves the reader deeply. This thesis attempts to make a Biblical archetypal study of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury so as to summarize the relationship between The Sound and the Fury and the Bible and probe into the humanity problems appeared in this novel.This thesis consists of six parts. Part one is the introduction which introduces some of the background knowledge about Faulkner and his works, gives a critical overview of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and presents the possibilities of analyzing The Sound and the Fury by using the Archetype Theory. Then it also makes a survey of Northrop Frye's Theory of Archetype and his concept of Archetype, Displacement and the three kinds of imagery, which will be employed in the analysis of The Sound and the Fury's Biblical archetypes.Part two is to analyze the Biblical archetypes connected with the plots of the novel from two different aspects, one is parallel correspondence and the other is displacement. Faulkner takes Jesus'stories in the Passion Week as the archetype of the Compsons'experience. In addition, the overall structure of this novel also touches upon parodically the structure of Gospels in The New Testament. By doing so, the correspondences contribute the ironic contrast between the Compsons'experiences and Jesus'counterparts. Then Faulkner discloses the root of the collapse of the Old American South by using the displacement of the Biblical archetypes.Part three is to analyze the Biblical archetypes connected with the characters of the novel. Most of the characters in The Sound and the Fury correspond with some figures in the Bible. By applying Frye's theory of Archetype and his concept of displacement, this part analyzes how Faulkner adopts and displaces the Biblical myths related to these archetypes and reflects the important role played by the character archetypes in deepening the theme of the novel.Part four by using the imageries classified by Frye, intends to analyze the Biblical archetypes connected with the images of the novel and reflects the doomed tragedy of the Compson family from different aspects and Faulkner's sharp insight in depicting the destiny of his characters.And part five, by analyzing the Biblical language archetypes appeared in the novel, intends to explore the inner world of the figures and probe into the humanity problem in the novel.The last part is the conclusion, which summarizes the findings in the archetypal analysis of the Biblical allusions related to the novel and the influences made by the Bible on The Sound and the Fury.