Guilty Parents Fail The Children And Grandchildren

William Faulkner, an American literary master, is one of the world famous novelists. He had taken Yusifu, his hometown in South of American, as a model and written series of novels about Yoknapatawpha. These novels had created a new world for Faulkner himself, also had left precious cultural heritage for us to learn the South.South is a mysterious zone, where once had established a brilliant culture of the South. But the Civil War in the 1960s destroyed the economic basis, social system and spirituality of the South, Meanwhile, the South was invaded by the Northern capitalistic business and belief, and began a process of modernization. Then the process brought fierce conflicts between new and old forces and concepts, which were backgrounds of Faulkner's novels written from the late 1920s to early 1940s.These novels, take the Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses, As I lay dying, Light in August, A Rose for Emily as models, described the history of prosperity and decline about a few big families. In these families, there are kinds of harmonious family relations, within which the relations between fathers and sons are the representative. And these relations have caused depression and confusion of the whole family. Faulkner displayed the complexity and mystery, charms and sins of the South's traditional culture, and reveals the sins of racism and the continuity in younger generation to the world.The fathers described in these novels had distinctive character. They were either selfish and merciless persons, or autocratic male chauvinists, or fanatical Puritan, and controlled the families firmly. The fathers committed many unpardonable sins in the South. They occupied the land, established the slavery system, and sold lands and slaves as their private property. They advocated racial system and persecuted blacks even the blacks were their sons. Also, they occupied woman black slaves even his own daughter. The lose of humanity and the moral decline not only caused social chaos but also distorted their children's character, and ruined their lives.Because of the fathers' sins and the cursed South, the fates of the younger generation were very miserable. And the fathers had made an indelibly negative impact on their children and led to a distorted relationship between them. They could get neither love from their families, nor the acceptance by their fathers, and finally ended their lives under the fathers' oppression or struggled desperately in the "psychological prison" constructed by their fathers, or even met with hatred and persecution. So they lost themselves, the survival wills and abilities, and the moral norms, which drove them to do weak or crazy behaviors. They became complete failures.Facing with the guilty South, Faulkner tried to find the roads of Redemption for human in his whole life. He created many vivid characters in his works. Some of these figures were kind-hearted and gave warmth to all the people who needed help. Some of them had realized the sins of mankind, and returned to the nature to clean their souls. Some faced the reality bravely, trying to pay for their fathers' "debts" consciously. By creating these roles in the novels, the writer displayed the models of the human to the world. Among the roads of Redemption, the favorite one considered by Faulkner was that returning to the embrace of God to find the survival basis of human and restoring the survival order, symbolized by the hard process that Lyna who was a character in Light in August, strove to find her child's father.Faulkner took his hometown, which was as small as a stamp, as a model to describe the historical process of the South, and exposed all kinds of sins of the racism, and revealed the existence of the human predicament. He pointed out a glorious road to the world, though hard but promising. And this is just the great significance of Faulkner and his works.