Postmodernist Elements In The Sound And The Fury

William Faulkner is a most important writer in American literary history. The Sound and the Fury is considered to be one of his most successful and most difficult works. Many critics tend to analyse the work from modernist perspective. This thesis, however, points out that with postmodernist techniques displayed in The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner could also be viewed as a postmodernist writer.This thesis makes a rough comparison between modernism and postmodernism. The comparison is made on the basis of three aspects: (1) many postmodernists, especially metafictionists, stress their concern with language and story-telling process, "the reality" or "the world" acquires a problematic status in their writings. Instead of trying to represent or reflect "the reality", they seek to reveal fiction as fiction; (2) the principle of indeterminacy is salient in postmodernist writings. This is because postmodernists are skeptical about the transparency of language, the organic universe, and the knowability of the world; and (3) many postmodernists doubt the truthfulness of the text caused by indeterminacy, and urges the reader to participate, together with the author, in the process of creating the textual meaning, which, therefore, manifests numerous possibilities in paraphrasing the text.The Southern and Faulkner’s own backgrounds together with his unceasing experiments make it natural for him to accept the above postmodernist ideas and techniques and practice them in his works. This especially can be traced in his masterpiece The Sound and the Fury. In this novel, Faulkner manifests the postmodernist ideas and techniques through the following methods: (1) numerous possibilities have joined the "narration plane" to constitute the "meta-fiction"; (2) there is no determinacy in this writing. We can see bifurcating plots, open endings, figure-like characters, fragmented narration, etc., that all point to indeterminacy; (3) due to the indeterminacy of the novel, readers no longer passively accept what the author tells about the story. They can have their personal understanding of the novel as well as dynamic searching for its implied meanings. The Sound and the Fury can be found to own earlier postmodernist thoughts and techniques under intensive reading. This novel reflects Faulkner’s ahead-of-time consciousness. In this sense, Faulkner could be glorified as one of the founders of postmodernism who pushed forward the rise of postmodernism. It is beyond question that Faulkner is esteemed to be the master of American literature.