Binary Oppositions In The Sound And The Fury And Red Sorghum: A Comparative Analysis

The Sound and the Fury indicates Faulkner’s complicated feelings towards hishometown. Though he gives critical comments on his hometown, he is sentimentallyattached to it too. From Faulkner’s strong sense of hometown, Mo Yan hasre-recognized his own hometown and has formed the similar thoughts as Faulkner has.This kind of thoughts is mainly represented in his work Red Sorghum.Both novels are set in their hometowns; the past and the present are intertwined inthem; and both novels display the writers’ contradictory and complex feelings towardstheir hometowns. This kind of contradiction and complexity indicates that there arephenomena of binary opposition in the novels. The theory of binary opposition, as thecore idea of structuralism, is usually applied to analyze the deep meaning of literaryworks. Structuralists believe that through finding the binary oppositions within the textand revealing how these oppositions interrelate, they can then decode the text andexplain the meaning. Based on this, the paper tries to comparatively study the binaryoppositions in the theme and in the character within the texts to explore the similarityin writers’ artistic thoughts of the two texts.First of all, this paper explores the common reasons why these two writers havesimilar binary oppositions in their thoughts. There are two reasons: one is the influenceof their hometowns; the other is special historical contexts. Then through the analysisof binary oppositions in the theme, it can be found that both writers have deepaffection towards the past and the tradition; but when confronting the oppositionbetween the past and the present, Faulkner tends to part the traditional values while MoYan is inclined to call for the return of traditional values. Finally, through the analysisof binary oppositions in the character, it can be found that both writers have exploredthe human nature and the social background causing that kind of human nature. Bothwriters hold positive attitude to human justice, but when judging the weakness ofhuman nature, Faulkner criticizes bitterly while Mo Yan feels it is the another side ofthe real human nature and it should be treated objectively.Through analyzing the binary oppositions in the two novels, it can be known thatFaulkner and Mo Yan adhere to the similar spiritual position when constructing the artof their hometowns and this similarity is not coincidence since they have similar lifeand social experience. In addition, although Mo Yan absorbs Faulkner’s artistic thoughts, he also integrates special situation in China’s modernized process into hisown artistic thoughts. It shows in a sense that Chinese contemporary writersrepresented by Mo Yan can accept the world literature and put it into use, which notonly enriches the Chinese contemporary literature but also enables the Chinesecontemporary literature to blend into the tide of world literature quickly.