The Beauty of Caricatures

Sanctuary is dark; it’s a really ugly story of some really ugly people with some really ugly flaws, people with grotesquely masks, like some twisted version of Commedia stock characters. of The book seems highly pessimistic, Faulkner exposes the rotten underbelly of human existence and in this context it is difficult to imagine that Faulkner as a poet is trying to “help man endure by lifting his heart”. However, sometimes to make art really pop, to really bring out the highlights we have to add a shadow.

There is not a single character in Sanctuary that is entirely pure, nobody is completely sympathetic because they are all flawed and in a sense, evil. It’s difficult to hate Popeye entirely because of the explanation of his background, it is difficult to sympathize with Temple because of her lies in the courtroom. The hypocrisy of mankind is continually brought to our attention and it leaves the reader with a lingering feeling of disgust, a sort of repulsion with people but, at the end of the novel we sit back and think “People really aren’t that bad. There really is good in people, Faulkner just leaves out all of the good things in life. Silly Faulkner, looking at nothing but evil, you didn’t see all of the beauty in the world”. That is exactly what he was going for. “The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.” Faulkner wasn’t trying to create a perfectly realistic depiction of the world, it is not a “record of man”, it is all caricature of mankind that emphasizes the ugly so that we see the beautiful things in life for ourselves.