On Faulkner’s View Of Time

As a famous American writer of Southern literature, William Faulkner wasengaged in writing throughout his life and he wrote altogether nineteen novels andmore than a hundred short stories, most of which had attained great reputation all overthe world. Enjoying local source materials, bold innovative techniques andthought-provoking psychological meanings, his works have great value for research invarious aspects such as aesthetic and narrative aspect, especially the time in his novels.The time view in Faulkner’s novels attained a profound and everlasting significancefor the modern society. This thesis tends to make a further study of the time view ofFaulkner in his four major works and his revelations for the modern people.This thesis consists of an introduction, the main body and a conclusion. Its maincontents are as follows:The first part is the introduction, which makes a brief summary of the previousresearch of Faulkner and his four major works, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!,The Sound and The Fury and As I Lay Dying, and then points out the greatsignificance of the analysis on Faulkner from his view of time.The second part is the main body, which is made up of four chapters:Chapter Ⅰ has retrospection on research of time in the history, including historicaltime represented by sunrise and sundown. The ancient people seemed to have littleconcept of time and their concept of time was closely related with their observation ofthe natural movement like the movement of celestial observations and humanmovements and later they developed the concept of cycling time and the concept oflinear time. In the modern time philosophical discussion on time turned to be bothinternalized and subjective and stayed away from the external objective time andturned to the world of concept and the person’s inner experience of time orpsychological time. In Faulkner’s novels, time is the complex and does not progressesorderly according to the clock timing, but is blended, through which Faulkner’sunique view of time was generalized: time is the nature of human life.Chapter Ⅱ analyzes the different time views of characters in Faulkner’s novels.The past made great pressure on the present and various characters, whosepsychological and moral attitude was affected in different ways. There are characters obsessed with the past like Quentin and Hightower who were deeply obsessed withthe past and became actionless in the real life. And there are characters lost in thepresent like Christmas and Cash who were buried in the anguish of reality and triedhard to find their way out. And there are characters who could coordinate time likeLena and Dilsey who assumed an optimistic attitude toward future. Through theirvarious attitudes toward the past, the present and the future, we can see Faulkner’sdebate on time views and his optimistic inclination.Chapter Ⅲ analyzes Faulkner’s time view in terms of the writing techniques, andthe relationship between unconventional arrangement of structure and the shifting oftime. No matter what type they assume they can be divided into three kinds: the firstis the story time and the real time, juxtaposition, repetition, and contrast are used toshow the eternity and passing-by of time; the second is the part time and the wholetime, such as in Light in August, it actually takes characters as its clue and The Soundand The Fury assumes four narrators each telling the story from their perspective andaccording to their own order of time, but each character’s part plays a role inconstituting the whole story; the third is the past time and the present time, eachcharacter had their past that was inescapable and they treated the present differently.Chapter Ⅳ analyzes the realistic reason for the time view, which is displayed inthree kinds of conflict: the conflict between reality and history, the honorable historyof the past forms great pressure on the declining reality; the conflict between humanand the world, in this industrial era, technology dominates the world of life andhuman cannot choose out of their autonomous will to strive in this mechanical world;the conflict between action and thought, in front of the inescapable past and theinvincible reality, should we choose to be obsessed with the past, to be lost in thepresent or to bravely overcome the bind of thought and take actions against time forthe true meaning of life. Faulkner tries to reveal to the modern people that time is thetrue nature of life and the true life lies in the good coordination of the past, the presentand the future.The last part is the conclusion, which makes a summary of the preceding critique,and points out the main purpose of this thesis. The limit of human being decides thatthey are playing a vulnerable role in the wild expansion of time. It is fortunate that people can pick up some of the past days through memories, but they must pay for it,because time is constantly changing the many details about the past, and nobody cango back to the past and ignore the present totally. So those characters that wereobsessed with the past in different ways failed unanimously in their attempts tocontrol time and became helpless in the true reality, and only those who treated thepast, the present and the future properly gained the true meaning of existence.Therefore Faulkner depicted so many obsessed characters and the declining southernworld not to commend their nostalgia of the old southern world, but to show therelationship between time and life and help them to live a meaningful life andcoordinate the past, the present and the future properly, which is the most reasonableoption before the realm of time.Faulkner tries to show the relationship between time and existence, and reveal tothe modern people that keeping the true meaning of life lies in keeping a proper viewof time.