Whose Is The Yoknapatawpha?

As a master of telling stories, William Faulkner not only writes volumes of excellent novels but also weaves good short stories. Like his novels in which racial problems constitute an essential part, Faulkner’s short stories are inseparable from racial problems. The aim of this thesis is to examine race and space in his short stories and explore how race is constructed in spaces and how spaces are taken as weapons by different races for their ends. Eight of William Faulkner’s short stories concerning the white, African Americans and Native Americans are selected and classified into three groups according to the prime race involved. With the help of Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space, space of the white, space of African Americans and space of Native Americans are explored specifically.Within Faulkner’s short stories, the space of the white undergoes changes because of which both the poor white and the last noble of decaying aristocracy suffer from loss of space. Within newly produced space, the poor white become "spaceless" and inhabit in space of others while the last noble inherit their dilapidating big houses and clumsily attempt to survive. Though they all desperately attempt to win their spaces back by taking spaces as weapons yet they fail to reach their ends. The space of African Americans is geographically strictly separated from space of the white. Within a world of whiteness, the space of African Americans is not only suppressed but also regulated to peripheral regions. By taking spaces of the white and stopping the white from constructing spaces, those African Americans temporarily win their space but they soon lose it. Like the white, those Native Americans also experience transformation in their space. By sticking to their native culture, those Native Americans initially not only keep their space but also make their space out of space of the white. However, as the white culture moves in and their gradual adoption of the white’s mores and slavery system, not only are those Native Americans corrupted, but also their space is lost. This paper concludes that each race’s space is a lost space and the world of Yoknapatawpha thus becomes a space divided.