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The force of community : an exploration of William Faulkner's use of minor characters in As I lay dying and Light in August / by Michelle Turek Fahey

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Identifier	Thesis 1524
Author	Fahey, Michelle Turek
Title	The force of community : an exploration of William Faulkner's use of minor characters in As I lay dying and Light in August / by Michelle Turek Fahey
Publisher	Central Connecticut State University
Date	1999
Resource Type	Master's Thesis
Notes	Few American literary figures have elicited more scholarly debate than William Faulkner. Over the past century, Faulkner's work has moved in and out of favor among critics. He has been celebrated as a regional genius and denounced as a misogynist and racist. Critics of the 1940's such as Malcolm Cowley and Robert Penn Warren created a surge of interest in William Faulkner through their Agrarian interpretations of Faulkner's body of work. This humanist approach to Faulkner was perpetuated further in the second half of the century by Cleanth Brooks. Critics like Brooks continued to attribute Faulkner's genius to a confirmation of the values of a benevolent small-town community. The underlying hypocrisy and cruelty of this community, however, was impossible to ignore. Modern critics began to focus on the malignancy of Faulkner's community, maneuvering this time to portray the community as a homogeneous agency of prejudice. Other critics decided to remove Faulkner from his offensive heritage and considered his works from a modernist perspective. Again, these views limited the scope of Faulkner's message for they ignored the paradoxical community within these works. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the force of the community within Faulkner's novels, specifically As I Lay Dying and Light in August. Faulkner's works reflect a deliberate consciousness of place and time. The questions that he explores within his Yoknapatawpha setting are a direct result of his heritage. Faulkner's personal exploration mirror those of his modern South. He is unable to condone his heritage, yet he cannot directly denounce it. In the course of fictionalizing the Southern community for his readers, he is compelled to portray all of its facets. The community, in all of its aspects, is a driving force within the novels As I Lay Dying and Light in August. The protagonists of these works are set against and acted upon by the community which surrounds them. In these novels, Faulkner brings the voices of the town forward as minor characters, a device which enables him to explore the effects of the Southern idea of community. The individual characters of these novels are left by Faulkner with the choice of accepting the role given by the community, passively resisting its constraints, or actively rebelling. The outcome of the character who has violated some moral code of the community is determined by the extent of the violation and the demeanor of the sinner. While there is room for the characters to violate, question and explore the roles set by the community, there is no hope for those who cannot find some accepted place within them. This certainly is the case with Addie and Darl Burdren in As I Lay Dying and is even more evident in the tragic endings of Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden in Light in August. These characters are so far outside of traditional roles that they are destroyed by a community seemingly based upon the idea of order and loyalty, but actually fragmented by the aftermath of gender and racial prejudice.
Subject	Faulkner, William, 1897-1962. As I lay dying Faulkner, William, 1897-1962. Light in August
Department	Department of English
Advisor	Dunne, Robert, 1964-
Type	Text
Digital Format	application/pdf
Language	eng
OCLC number	42423441
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The force of community : an exploration of William Faulkner's use of minor characters in As I lay dying and Light in August / by Michelle Turek Fahey

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