A Psychoanalytical Approach To The Sound And The Fury

As an outstanding representative of American Southern writers, William Faulkner is impelled by his deep obsessions with the South to describe the frustrations and helplessness of Southerners in confrontation with historical changes within his"own little postage stamp of native soil". The Sound and the Fury conveys exactly the loss and corruption of Southern honor and morals by means of monologues of the Compson brothers. It is usually selected by Faulkner as his favorite, the book he has"the most tenderness for", for the very reason that, this novel is in Faulkner's mind the most meaningful one and moreover, it involves painstaking efforts and more stylistic innovations of the author. Although the characters whose conflicting mind mirrors the chaotic world especially have received diverse analysis and studies, The Sound and the Fury is still of strong artistic charms and extremely deep connotations. Based on psychoanalytical interpretation and sociological psychology, this dissertation is intended to analyze the mind-styles of the Compson brothers, to explore Faulkner's dare experimentation and innovations in modernist narrative techniques, and furthermore, to reveal Faulkner's covert psychological tendencies in writing this novel.Chapter One is devoted to the analysis of the personalities and mind-styles of the Compson brothers, pointing out that, situated in such a family lacking love, they all suffer from psychic trauma in a way or another and their mental deficiencies render different mind-styles: standing for the part of"id"in Freudian personality construct, Benjy the idiot exhibits the mind-style of mental retardation caused by psychic impotence and mental retardation; Quentin, who shoulders the responsibility of maintaining the family honor and traditional morals, manifests some characteristics of the"ego", and lives in a split world, trying desperately to balance himself between feeling and thinking, between tradition and violence, and thus exhibiting the mind-style and narrative style of schizophrenia; while as far as Jasonis concerned, he exhibits some characteristics of"super-ego", aspiring to cool-heartedly repress freedom and satisfying of"desires"and trying every means to accumulate wealth and therefore Jason unfolds us the mind-style and narrative style of paranoia. Chapter Two centers on two female figures: Caddy and Dilsey. On the one hand, Faulkner creates Caddy as a figure who is deprived of the right of narrating her own story and is doomed to destruction in the masculinity-centered society. On the other, through Caddy's tragedy, Faulkner intends to criticize the Southern society, foretelling its decay and corruption, and tries to find the way out for it—to pin his hope on Dilsey, bearing in hope that she can set the example for women and symbolize the future for the South. Chapter Three is devoted to the analysis of Faulkner's experimentation in modernist narrative techniques. Faulkner uses modernist techniques such as"stream of consciousness","composite narrative structure","multiple points of view","free association", and"displacement of time sequence"to fulfill the perfect congruency between form and content. The last chapter concentrates upon the analysis of some overt and covert psychological tendencies in Faulkner's creating this novel, and accordingly we can see from it Faulkner's autonomous complexity and inferiority complex in writing the novel and the masculinity-centered discourse reflected in Faulkner himself.Through the analysis of the Compson children, through the various psychological abnormalities and predicaments, we see that in the epic-like novel The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner depicts the shattering of the whole southern social and value system. However, the artistic charm of the novel lies far beyond this. What's more important, it lies in that, Faulkner confronts ideas, impressions, memories of characters to readers in a direct way without comment and explanation, enabling them to experience the"deformed"psyches of characters; and taking an overall look at Faulkner's artistic techniques, we are prone to be moved by the psychological tendencies Faulkner exhibits as a novelist.