A Study Of Faulkner's Views Of The Blacks In His Short Stories

As a writer who has a typical "southern" cultural background,Faulkner has created many well-developed black images in his novels.The topic of "race" has been given great importance in his novels.Researchers at home and abroad have studied his views of blacks from different perspectives,but there are few studies on them in terms of linguistic analysis,especially from the perspective of textual function under functional grammar.And most of the research is focused on Faulkner's famous novels while ignoring his short stories.The theme-rheme structure runs from the beginning to the end of the discourse development,affecting the internal structure of sentences and the generation of discourse,and plays an important role in textual cohesion.The author's reasonable or intentional arrangement of the theme and the thematic progression pattern can reflect the author's thoughts.Based on the theme and thematic progression pattern in functional linguistics,this thesis selects Faulkner's three representative short stories: A Rose for Emily,Dry September,and That Evening Sun,all of which deal with the ethnic relationship between the white and the black.By collecting the sentences which constitute the whites' image,the blacks' image,the others' image,and their utterance,this thesis analyzes the simple theme,multiple theme,clausal theme and five thematic progression patterns that Faulkner chose,and calculate their proportion,in order to reveal Faulkner's subconscious views of blacks.Through data analysis,it can be found that for the formation of different characters,Faulkner chose different theme and thematic progression patterns:As a writer who inherited the background of Southern America,Faulkner used some interpersonal themes to express his attitude when shaping white women.It is a kind of respectful and complex emotion.He has a love for the southern America but also has contradictions so that his anti-racial thought is slowly developing.When shaping black people,there are no textual themes,which indicates that black people are independent individuals and have no connection with others.Using the split rheme pattern,Faulkner subjectively puts the words of blacks behind whites in his subconsciousness,reflecting his tendency to deal with blacks with racism.That Evening Sun characterizes white children and black woman.The theme choices between them are almost the same.They are all described by "I".People are not born racists,but develop into racists later.Here,Faulkner's thoughts about anti-racism have taken shape,and his views on black people are beginning to waver,which shows the contradiction of his racial outlook,reflecting his hesitation between racism and equality.Through the study of the theme and the thematic progression in the sentence and discourse,we can find that Faulkner sometimes has the idea of white superiority,and sometimes has the idea of racial equality,indicating the author's ambivalence toward racial issues.To a certain extent,it also reflects the style of that society at that time.Through these studies,the author hopes to provide a new way in studying literature in the future and analyzing Faulkner's views of black people in the construction of discourse to promote the appreciation of and research on Faulkner's novels and short stories.