An Interpretation Of The Sound And The Fury: From The Perspective Of Classical Narratology

As a leader of southern American literature, William Faulkner has made greatachievements in the creation of fiction, which has deep influence on Americanliterature or even the world literature. Published in1929, The Sound and the Fury isFaulkner’s first mature work, and also his favorite book into which he put the mosteffort. This novel tells a story about the Compsons from prosperity to decline inJefferson town in a creative way. It is also well received by the public for its uniquenarrative features and distinct style of language. The critics mostly focus on the studiesof point of view, the writing skill of stream of consciousness, the analysis of thecharacters in different perspective, the theory of feminism and myth and archetypalcriticism and so on. There is little study on the narratology approach to the novel.Therefore, this thesis aims to have a systematical study of the narrative features in thetheory of narratology.The paper attempts to interpret this novel in Genette Gerard ‘s related theory ofclassical narratology. Genette Gerard is one of the representatives of classicalnarratology. His theory of narratology mostly embodies in the book NarrativeDiscourse published in the year of1972. And in this novel, one characteristic is themixture use of multi-perspective narration and multiple focalization. Besides, the shiftof time and tense is also wondrous. Hence, this thesis aims to interpret the narrativefeatures of the novel in Genette Gerard’s classical narratology theory of narrator,narrative perspective, narrative time and tense and find out the effects of it. Thenarrative features of this novel are mainly embodied in the following aspects,including the mixture of multi-perspective and multi-focalization in narrative situation,the narrative time being order in a mess and the wondrous use of tense shift. Based onthe above study, we can draw a conclusion: the narrative features of the novel createdthe artistic effects, and that are the reliability of the narrators, the uncertainty of thenarrative time and the different language style caused by different narrators. To sum up,by doing so can we explore the intension of the author so as to have a more thoroughunderstanding of this great novel.