On Characters' Complexities Of William Faulkner's Sanctuary

William Faulkner is a shining star in the era of southern renaissance.His works have both delicate sensitivity and dignified atmosphere.The majestic atmosphere is derived from his depiction of a series of stories about the tremendous“Yoknapatawpha county”.Temporal setting of his novels is arranged in the decayed South after the Civil War.His exquisite sensitivity is formed by characters' complex image-buildings.What he writes is nothing more than the female image of “Southern Lady” and their “life after the defeat of the South”,but Faulkner can be meticulously detailed and enjoy a great variety of perspectives.Faulkner's works have profound implications for the exploration of the human moral and spiritual world.Many writers depict the scene of victory that oppositely means desperation in their mentality,while Faulkner writes the inner despair of humanity through using the description of injustice to express his truly moral value.After careful reading,we can find that complexities generally exist in characters.The complexities of characters here refer to the multifaceted personalities and behavioral motives.In other words,characters in Sanctuary are not pure kindness,nor are they absolutely evil.They are intertwined with good and evil.After reading the novel,readers can make a clear estimation of right and wrong.But behind this moral assessment,through the combination of the influence of characters' growth environment,readers will be prone to show their feelings of compassion and sigh.The depiction of protagonists' backgrounds of growth shows Faulkner's sympathy toward them.This kind of characterization has received mixed reactions.He has turned us from aversion toward characters to a kind of sadness.In the past literary theory,the emphasis was generally on linear and single literary values,while the complexity thinking broke the original model and gave us a multidimensional way to thinking.This article is an ideological extension of the article “On the good and evil conflicts of Sanctuary” by Professor Xiao Minghan.He thinks that the story has obvious conflicts between good and evil at first,but the boundary between them gradually blurs and slowly reflects a kind of complexity of humanity(Xiao Minghan,1999:3).Nevertheless,he does not elaborate reasonably on the complexity of humanity,butmerely had a fuzziness that exists within the moral boundaries of Horace.Therefore,this article will use Faulkner's Sanctuary as the research object,through textual reading and textual analysis,personalities of characters will be analyzed aiming to the further analysis of Faulkner's undeclared moral value.The thesis mainly interprets from three parts,namely personality complexity of character,behavioral complexity of character and complexity of character's final result.These three aspects complement each other.The complexities of personalities need to be reflected through their behaviors,and the complexities of behaviors focus on the analysis of the complex psychological motivation behind their behaviors.The complexities of characters' final results need to be deduced from complexities of personality and behavior: in short,the complexities of personality and behavior led to decisions(=final results)they make.First,the complexity of personality is reflected by the protagonist's behavior,discourse utterance,clothing dress,countenance and others' evaluation.The first analysis in this paper is Temple.Temple has bold and gentle personalities that are quite different.In the discourse expression,she showed her complexity between insensitivity and sporadic intelligence.Under the analysis of Temple's discourse and behavior,we can conclude that she has both vain and conservative personalities.Despite of her conservativeness,boldness and rationality,these fine qualities will only be short-lived in Temple's mind.The second one is Horace.The strongest trait of Horace is harmless.He is weak but courageous;he has a noble social status and comes from the upper society while he is short of enough knowledge.His unrealistic inner illusions are enemies of his professor as a lawyer.The third one is Popeye.He is both timid and strong.In this novel,his fragility and cruelty in his personality depend on each other and push him forward to the final result of his tragic life.Secondly,through the analysis of protagonists' behaviors,complexities of behaviors explain the complexity of hidden psychological motivation.In the face of Popeye's rape,Temple showed her complexity in her mental state.On the one hand,she wanted to be raped by Popeye owing to her sexual desire.On the other hand,she was scared of the unknown.As she faced the emergency situation of Gowan driving up to the tree that crossed the road,her first reaction was to wait for danger instead of trying to resist her fellow Gowan to slam on his brake.For her,the behavior of absurdity has its own logical pattern.During the process of appealing for Ruby's husband Lee Goodwin,Horace first learned of the existence of evil in the south society,instead of resisting,he began to become passive and no longer relived theblind optimism in former days.Horace showed overly respect to the southern lady.In his opinion,the southern lady is a symbol of nature and has a supreme position.However,Horace completely lost his own voice in compliance.Popeye showed the complexity of his behavior from three aspects.Owing to his physical impotence,he feared that he would never regain his past glory as a real man,which made him have a complex mentality in choosing to rape Temple and getting along with her.Thirdly,from different final results of the three characters to analyze the complexity of the hidden psychological state,the final result is also determined by the complexities of one's personality and behavior.Temple,who was timid and evasive,could not escape the shackles of her autocratic family.Under the menace of her family,she made the false testimony and indirectly killed the innocent man Goodwin.Although Temple was afraid of and rebellious of what she had done before leaving the court,the resistance was only a gesture.At the beginning of the story,Horace bravely chose to leave the misfortune marriage he was eager to escape,but he eventually returned to live with his wife.Horace's “return” represents his compromise on life,shows his endless complaint and jealousy.Everything returns to original points.After outguessing the nothingness of life,Popeye used the way of death to end his deadly life and showed his desperation toward the decayed society.His attitude toward Christ is contradictory.On the one hand,he sought asylum when an emergency situation appeared;On the other hand,he ridiculed the Christianity.The conclusion of this thesis summarizes the main findings of the first three chapters that are interlocking.The full text is analyzed in the logical form of“personality—behavior—final results” and guides us to see what kind of tragedy the swaying life may make and establishes the correct moral values established by Faulkner.