Incest, A Metaphor Of The Decaying South

William Faulkner is one of the greatest contemporary writers in the United States, who is always associated with the American South. The writer works hard on his "little postage stamp of native soil" for decades and writes enduring novels one after another which win him worldwide fame. These masterpieces root in the American South and explore the fate of American society and even of the human beings. The Sound and the Fury is one of them. The novel focuses on an ever-prominent and once distinguished family - the Compsons in the American South and depicts the decline of the family from the viewpoints of the three Compson children and the author himself.This novel was published in 1929, and is considered as Faulkner's first masterpiece. There are four children in this family: Quentin, Jason, Benjy and Caddy. Caddy is the central character in this novel, because all of her brothers' lives have a close relationship with her, among whom Quentin and Benjy both have incestuous feeling towards her. The incestuous and abnormal feeling between the brother and sister signifies the fall in their mentality and psychology; the loss of the innocence that Quentin witnesses in Caddy's fall is something that he finds intolerable, all these stand for the fall in people's morality and the Southern society. Each member of the family, especially those involved in the incest, represents a segment of society; their struggle to avoid their family's disintegration parallels the same fight in the larger world, that is, the South or even the whole nation. The story of the Compson family shows how this aristocratic family experiences many of the social changes and also the decay of the family itself in the social status and traditional honor. It is the microcosm of this southern family that illustrates Faulkner's ultimate goal - "to seek out the nature of man," according to Ralph Ellison. Faulkner makes use of this symbol to describe the decay of the whole Southern society which eventually leads to its failure in the process of the American history.Incest is taboo in almost every society and every period of history, including the...