Faulkner's methods of narration can present an array of problems for readers. His narrators are multiple, say different things about different people and events, speak in very different (sometimes confusing) ways, and operate at varying levels of reliability at different moments in his stories.
You know, like real life.
As a modernist artist working out (some might even saying perfecting) the influence of Joyce, Faulkner fiddles with voice, showing how narrators control our perception of events in the story, how alternate points of view can enhance our understanding of those events, and how the reader or hearer of a story actively participates in the work of meaning-making.
As he noted in one interview about Absalom, Absalom!, a novel where getting the "right" view of Thomas Sutpen is the primary activity of Quentin and the other characters:
Q: "does any one of the people [in AA] have the right view, or is it more or less a case of thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird with none of them right?"For those of us who favor linear revelation of detail and omniscient or objective presentations of thought and action, Faulkner's brilliantly complex, shifting narrative technique can be confusing--even, for some of us, downright infuriating. Either way, his narrative technique is something we've got to grapple with as we study Faulkner; in order to do so, this assignment asks you to try it out for yourself.
F: "That's it exactly. I think that no one individual can look at truth. It blinds you. You look at it and you see one phase of it. Someone else looks at it and sees a slightly awry phase o fit. But taken all together, the truth is in what they saw though nobody saw the truth intact. So these are true as far as Miss Rosa and as Quentin saw it. Quentin's father saw what he believed was truth, that was all he saw. […] It was, as you say, thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird. But the truth, I would like to think, comes out, that when the reader has read all these thirteen different ways of looking at the blackbird, the reader has his own fourteenth image of that blackbird, which I would like to think is the truth."
Choose a character from either As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury whose voice Faulkner does not include in the narration or who does not narrate a particular event, and add a scene to the novel, writing it from that character's point of view.
The voice you narrate in must be consistent with the character if the person speaks in the novel, or be believably that person's if he or she does not. Think through how a character would view a particular set of events and model, or create, that person's voice.
Some ideas (there are tons of options):
- Caddy
- Luster looking for his quarter
- Darl's first session with a psychiatrist in Jackson, just after the events of AILD
- The new Mrs. Bundren
- Addie
- Addie's coffin (?!)
This does not need to be double-spaced; design your manuscript as you see fit, with readability and a particular aesthetic in mind.
This assignment is due Friday, 2/29. Turn your paper in to me via your campus e-mail account.
This assignment is due Friday, 2/29. Turn your paper in to me via your campus e-mail account.
