William Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers in American literature generally and Southern literature specifically. He gained his fame after receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, for which he became the only Mississippi-born Nobel laureate. Two of his works, A Fable and his last novel The Reivers, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked his novel The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century; also on the list were As I Lay Dying and Light in August.The Sound and the Fury is one of the Faulkner’s masterpieces. It employs a lot of narrative techniques, including stream of consciousness, which is pioneered by modern novelists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The book was published in 1929 but did not gain its due success until 1931 when Faulkner’s sixth novel Sanctuary was published. The Sound and the Fury has been the typical American high modernist novel for over sixty years. As soon as readers and commentators discovered it in the late forties and early fifties, their attention was caught by it. Being somewhat of a touchstone, it has made critical approaches test themselves on it, from Marxism to New Criticism, to Structuralism and Deconstruction, Linguistics, Feminism, and New Historicism, each of which has augmented our understanding of the book. Even so, there are still many facets awaiting us to discover.The subject of time prevails in The Sound and the Fury and is one of the most studied themes by critics. Studies on the time subject of this novel range from its narrative technique to its philosophical sense.This thesis mainly focuses on the psychological time perspective in The Sound and the Fury. It is mainly built on Philip Zimbardo’s theory of time perspective, which is how people see time and how time perspective impacts human behavior.In the Sound and the Fury, the characters Benjy, Quentin, Jason and Dilsey perceive time from different perspectives, as Benjy’s being event-time perspective, Quentin’s being past-negative perspective, Jason’s being present-oriented perspective, and Dilsey’s being transcendental-future perspective, and the ways they perceive time have huge impacts on their behavior. Therefore, this thesis consists of four chapters, and each chapter is further divided into three sections.The first chapter talks about how Benjy perceives time, the reason for such time perspective and how his behavior is influenced by his time perspective; the second chapter analyzes Quentin’s time perspective and how his behavior is impacted by it; the third chapter focuses on Jason’s time perspective, how his time perspective differs from that of the others, and how his behavior is determined by the present-oriented time perspective; the last chapter casts light on Dilsey’s time perspective, the reason for her time perspective and how her behavior is affected by it. And in the conclusion, Faulkner’s reason of the arrangement of the chapter order of The Sound and the fury will be revealed. |