William Faulkner: Writing Style and Techniques
“Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.”
William Faulkner, an interview of The Paris Review, in 1956.
As an innovative writer, Faulkner is known for his experimental writing style with meticulous evaluation of the utterance, diction and cadence and scrupulous attention to the details of characters’ utterance and state of minds. He experimented intelligently with switching different perspectives and voices, including those of children, the outcast, the insane and the illiterate. Moreover, he is talented at the arrangement of narrative chronology, sometimes by breaking the time frame and re-combining it with whole new aspect. His rich and brilliant baroque writing style is developed in the extremely long sentences embedding with complex subordinate parts.
Faulkner’s stories were often written with a highly emotional, delicate, cerebral, complicated style with Gothic or grotesque elements. The characters in the novel had great range of variety; they might be former or runaway slaves, the descendant of slaves, the poor white, agrarians, working-class Southerners and the aristocracy from old and traditional Southern families. What’s more, he re-illustrated the history of the land and paid lot of attention on the racialism—Indian, African-American, Euro-American, centering on the social tensions between the old and new generation, the traditional and modern South and the aristocracy and the lower-class.
“The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.”
Flannery O’Connor
Yoknapatawpha County
William Faulkner created a plenary imaginative scene, Yoknapatawpha County, which became story settings in numerous novels and the landscape in which those depicted families live and have great interconnection with each other, extending for generations. The capital of Yoknapatawpha County, Jefferson, is designed based on Faulkner’s hometown, Oxford, Mississippi and its surroundings.
William Faulkner created a plenary imaginative scene, Yoknapatawpha County, which became story settings in numerous novels and the landscape in which those depicted families live and have great interconnection with each other, extending for generations. The capital of Yoknapatawpha County, Jefferson, is designed based on Faulkner’s hometown, Oxford, Mississippi and its surroundings.
Novels and short stories set in Yoknapatawpha County:
Sartoris/Flags in the Dust (1929)
The Sound and the Fury (1929)
As I Lay Dying (1930)
“A Rose for Emily” (1930)
“Spotted Horses” pub. in Scribner's Magazine (1930)
“Dry September” (1931)
“That Evening Sun” (1931)
Sanctuary (1931)
Light in August (1932)
Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
The Unvanquished (1938)
“Barn Burning” (1939)
The Hamlet (1940)
“Two Soldiers” (1942)
Go Down, Moses (1942)
“Shingles for the Lord” (1943)
Intruder in the Dust (1948)
Knight's Gambit (1949)
Requiem for a Nun (1951)
The Town (1957)
The Mansion (1959)
The Reivers (1962)
Stream of consciousness
Faulkner used the technique, “stream of consciousness,” in his writings frequently. In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode which seeks to picture one individual’s point of view with the written equivalence of following the process of characters’ thoughts either in a hazy interior monologue on in connection with character’s reactions. It is a peculiar form of an inner monologue, and is often delineated by the connection with leaping syntax, punctuation and story plots that make the text hard to be understood or followed by readers. The stream-of-conscious enables writers to address audiences into the scene with the speech and the dramatic monologue of the third person.
pictures from:
Wikipedia.
“William Faulkner. ” Wikipedia. 10 Jun 2011.
Sources from:
“William Faulkner. ” Wikipedia. 10 Jun 2011.
“William Faulkner and the Southern Writers—The Sound and the
Fury.” C-Span American Writers—A Journey through History. 8 Jun
2011.
My favourite novels of William Faulkner are As I lay dying, Sound and Fury and Sablonam, Sablonami. His style is exploring the unfelt, unfathomed inner world of soul.
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