From The Distant Roots Of The Deep South

This essay is trying to explore the relationship between American modern novelist William Faulkner and his culture quality and character of Southernism. Except for the unique individuality of American Deep South, as a descendant of distinguished southern farm-owner, Faulkner has his plentiful and unparalleled understanding towards South.The first part of this essay deals with the thematic explanations of Southernism in Faulkner's works. Using his thematic consistent series of works, Faulkner created a Yoknapatawpha World. Behind the background of Faulkner's family, not only the saga of Satoris, Sutpen, McCullers, Compson and Snopes , but also the southern living scenes of Frenchman's Bend, railways, wild forests are all vividly depicted. Furthermore , using the thematic explanations Faulkner expressed his ambiguous and complicated cultural criticism towards racial discrimination, living conditions of Southern descendants and the history, actuality and future of Deep South.In the second part, the essay explained the aesthetic methods in Faulkner's works. Faulkner's temporal philosophy including the unique signification of Faulkner's time-consciousness and the distinct understanding of several important time crunodes such as Civil War . To Faulkner, time and southern history are always disputing with each other. And the past-now-future twist together. Moreover, there's always a hallucination of "sound" in Faulkner's works. That is to say, Faulkner tried to remould the pattern of novelist-reader into the storyteller-listener mode. The southern legends, time-confusing imagination, old records and the enmeshed memory as narration patterns all exhibited Faulkner's narration attitudes and techniques.The third part of the essays tries to lay out the group characters of Southerners and further explore the connection between Faulkner and Southernism. Comparing with hopeless southern intellectuals, only young children and women who standing at the edge of social authority structure inherit and carry forward the ancient quality of courage, honour, hope, proud, sympathy and mercy. By shaping the more complex figure of the Black , Faulkner showed his personal understanding and prejudice. And to the special "grey" characters including madman-idiot-prophet , poor whites and mulattos, they are unexceptionally in the shadow of suspensive mentality and identity.Faulkner's conditions is as same as many southern intellects who love south , sympathize the Black but also fear of violent social revolutioa Faulkner's Yoknapatwpha saga is the Balzac resurgence of Deep South history, and at the same time , the distinct Fautknerary imagination. The author of this essay strongly believe that discussion towards Faulkner and his Southernism is endless and infinite.