Text World Approach To Caddy’s Image In The Sound And The Fury

As one of the most influential American writers in the 20 th century, William Faulkner has created many great works in his life time. The Sound and the Fury is the only one of them which has attracted relatively more attention from scholars both at home and abroad. However, the study on world construction of the heroine Caddy’s image in this novel under the Text World Theory is quite insufficient. Text worlds are discourse participants’ mental representations constructed in discourse processes, referring to the cognitive construction of all situations in the novel. This theory explains how readers and authors reach a successful communication in a split spatial-temporal space.The narrative methods utilized in the novel are different from those of the traditional literary works in that these methods include many narrative features, such as the employment of multiple points of view, the utilization of the stream of consciousness. Especially, the characterization of character’s inner worlds and the disordered deployments of time and space make the novel hard to be understood. Therefore, in order to solve this reading difficulty, the thesis has taken Caddy as a research object, trying to illustrate how readers make online interpretations of the plots as well as how to construct Caddy’s images.Based on the novel’s narrative perspective, the thesis has divided the novel into two parts: the first-person narration and the third-person narration. Then, according to the narrative features used mainly in the first three parts, the thesis has focused on the narrators’ inner worlds, such as inner thoughts, memories and free associations. The analysis of the third-person narration has focused on the narrations and speeches of characters. Besides, according to the accessibility of sub-worlds, the thesis has discussed the narrators’ reliability in the world creation of Caddy’s images.The major findings are narrowed down as follows: 1) Caddy holds quite a contradictory image. On one hand, she has a quality a traditional woman has. She cares about Benjy and knows her own guilt and responsibility for her daughter. On the otherhand, she holds quite a different personality from the women in that era. She is a courageous woman who dares to pursue her own happiness and love. However, she is a tragic and pathetic woman. Just because of her behavior of breaking the old rules and conventions she is rendered a victim to the strict social system. 2) Readers switch back and forth from sub-worlds created by Benjy, Quentin and Jason to the text world created by the third-person narration. Besides, readers frequently enter in and out of the sub-worlds created by each section and stay longer in the sub-worlds created in the first-person narration. 3) The sub-worlds created by Benjy, Quentin and Jason respectively are inaccessible to readers, thus we could not assess its truth-value and reliability. However, Dilsey acts as an implied author in a quasi-discourse world. In her text world, we can project our life experiences into that world so as to reach a successful communication with the real author.To sum up, the cognitive poetic analysis of the novel based on Text World Theory shows how readers create online mental worlds with the textual information in order to interpret the plots and more plentiful images of the heroine Caddy. This is where the great explanatory power of Text World Theory lies, which also provides a new perspective for the analysis of this stream of consciousness novel.