Freud and Lacan's psychoanalytic perspective and Faulkner's 'The Sound and the Fury'

This thesis is concerned with Freud, Lacan and Faulkner's explorations of psychology and language, regarded as differential versions of common concerns. In the first part, using aspects of the Freudian concept of the unconscious, and reading Faulkner's stream-of-consciousness narrative in The Sound and the Fury, we find that Faulkner seeks to convey the flow of the unconscious. In the second part, we see that Lacan reads Freud through Saussure's linguistics, and renews Freudian psychoanalysis with the Lacanian concept of an unconscious structured like a language. Beyond Freud, with reference to these Lacanian notions, we find that Faulkner produces a narrative structured like a language. In the third part, through the application of Lacanian theories of narration to literary theories, and through a Barthes-inspired comparison of Faulkner's novel with Lu Xun's short story "A Madman's Diary", we see that while Lu Xun gives his readers a world of meaning, Faulkner shows them the world of the word without any meaning by creating a new narrative strategy.