On The Universality Of Faulkner's Theme And Style--A Multiple-Perspective Study Of The Sound And The Fury

Faulkner is one of the American modern novelists who have gained a worldwide reputation. He has inherited a lot from others and adds his own individual contributions to the tradition of the 19th- and early 20th-century fiction. The Sound and the Fury, among his greatest achievements presents a lively theme and unique narrative techniques. It is his first most creative work and his favorite which first made him world-famous. Today it is generally recognized as Faulkner's greatest success and one of America's greatest works of literature. Faulkner uses modern literary techniques, such as chronological juxtaposition, multiple point of view and monologue, to depict the ups and downs of the Compsons, to reveal the decadence and disintegration of Old South. The esteem of the great work is to a large extent due to his creative employment and development of these modern literary techniques, as well as his profound theme which discusses the human fate in general and the spiritual destination of the modern man in particular. Undoubtedly, the perfect combination of content and form endows the work with a universal myth. This paper attempts to reveal the universality of the myth by multiple perspectives, such as artistic perspective, temporal perspective, Christian archetypal perspective, gender perspective and racial perspective.