The novel Absalom Absalom! by William Faulkner is filled with biblical references, from the creation story to Abraham, from David and Goliath to the story of Ham. Faulkner infuses the novel with biblical language, making it impossible to ignore...

Absalom, Absalom displays two narrators standing at opposite poles in their understanding of time. The first of these, Rosa Coldfield, narrates to a patiently listening Quentin Compson what one might call the life and times of Thomas Sutpen. This...

Who says what - and how and when - may be the most compelling way William Faulkner constructs his characters in Absalom, Absalom! Storytelling is not just an act in which the saga of the Sutpens is recounted, revised, and even recreated; it is a...

Part of an old southern family from Mississippi, William Faulkner chooses to inscribe in his writing the culture of his white heritage: the stories, myths and nightmares of the South. He particularly selects to portray the fall of the old...

William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom identifies the fundamental problem of Southern history as a wretched combination of two predominant qualities: the shameful and abhorrent nature of the past, and the haunting and mythical presence of such a...

At the heart of Absalom, Absalom is the violence of class division, national division, and racial division; particularly the violence between white Southerners and black slaves as a substitute for the violence poor whites would like to commit...

“Noah’s children had inherited the flood although they had not been there to see the deluge” (Go Down, Moses 276). This sense of doom follows through five of the major novels written by William Faulkner set in his mythic Yoknapatawpha County. Doom...

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner is a maze; it is a maze with innumerable detours and dead ends, pathways that lead to a finale and obstacles to be overcome on the way there. One such obstacle is the triangular relationship between Henry...

“On or about December 1910 human nature changed. All human relations shifted…and when human relations change there is at the same time change in religion, politics, and literature”; thus, Modernism was born (Woolf qtd in Galens 175). Modernism was...

Deeply entrenched misogynistic attitudes pervaded the nineteenth century. Almost all men expected women to fill the role of mother, sister, or wife. They could not imagine and often actively worked against a society in which females could exist...

As a classic source of insight and wisdom in the Western heritage, the Bible has been studied, questioned, and alluded to for as long as it has captured the imagination of believers and novelists alike. As such, this perennial text lends itself...

William Faulkner created Yokopatpua County to constitute a world in which his fictional stories/novels would take place and fit into the southern gothic genre. Within this town is tragedy, death, racism, gender role reversal, and a social...

A desire of power is one of the most robust drives of human beings. This desire promotes determination for achieving goals and ambitions. Determination and ambition are two essential forces to allow humans to find reason and purpose in their...

The single chapter in As I Lay Dying where Moseley becomes the narrative focalizer, is anomalous because the focalizer is a character that had not yet been mentioned, and is never mentioned again. The general pattern in the novel is that each...

"It's like it aint so much what a fellow does, but it the way the majority of folks is looking at him when he does it," (Faulkner, 233). In William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, an obvious discrepancy exists between death and birth and between words...

One of William Faulkner's most celebrated qualities is his inventiveness. As I Lay Dying has fifteen unique narrators, one of them a dead woman, and the novel avoids traditional ideas of linear and chronological structure. Faulkner's style demands...

"He had a word, too. Love, he called it." Although Addie Bundren dismisses the word love when used by her husband, Anse, as "just a shape to fill a lack," her other relationships are not as empty (172). In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner reveals the...

One of the central thematic elements of As I Lay Dying is the distinction between fact and interpretation of fact. Clearly, any objective fact can result in a multitude of subjective interpretations because the characters all have individual...

William Faulkner uses multiple narrators in As I Lay Dying, a technique that enables him to illustrate different mindsets on events and ethical questions. Some narrators’ motivations are clear: Dewey Dell is determined to get an abortion, for...

At the crux of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is the issue of communication. The characters' methods of communicating are many and vary, in some cases, depending upon the characters' relationships with one another. Verbal communication is curt and...

In typical modernist fashion, William Faulkner experiments in his work with a number of nontraditional stylistic and thematic characteristics, including brokenness, fragmentation, despair, pessimism, perception distortion, and the rejection of...

The story of a dysfunctional family and its epic journey across the South, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying is famous for its use of multiple narrators who interpret and recount the journey of the Bundren clan from their own unique perspectives....

In William Faulkner’s novel, As I Lay Dying, the dysfunctional Bundren family embarks on a telling journey from their farm in Yoknapatawpha County to bury their recently deceased and unmatronly matriarch, Addie. Composed of 59 sections narrated by...

“Silver Sparrow,” by Tayari Jones, is a story told in the first person by Dana, the narrator, telling a story about her childhood while looking back as an adult. It takes place in Atlanta, Georgia during the 21st century, although specific dates...