A Song Of Carnival

William Faulkner, the winner of Noble Prize for literature in 1949, is one of the most important writers in the American South in twentieth century. Faulkner’s works are rooted in the Southern culture, involving in the race, hierarchy and the family issues. His masterpiece The Sound and the Fury is such a novel that tells the comedown of the Compson family. The story is told by the monologues of three sons in the family, and then narrated by an omniscient perspective.Subversive spirits in The Sound and the Fury are explored in the perspective of Bakhtin’s carnival theory. The subversive spirits lie in subversive characterization, subversive use of language and narrative and subversive themes. The subversive characterization includes paired images and typical carnival characters. These carnival characters sense the world in the unique perspective, subverting the traditional characterization. As for the use of language and narrative, Faulkner adopts Standard English, dialects, foreign languages, stream of consciousness and the nonlinear narrative to make characters speak in the novel as freely as in carnival, which subvert the traditional narrative. The subversive themes find their evidence in the subversion of hierarchy and morality. On the one hand, the economic line between the upper class and the lower class is blurred, and their respective stereotypes dismantled; on the other hand, one image with opposite personalities indicates the subversion of morality.The carnival theory provides a unique perspective to reveal the subversion hidden in the novel, so that the appreciation of the characters are enriched and readers are allowed to have insight into the historical trend that the Southern tradition has gone. Faulkner shows readers a carnival scene in which the hierarchy is subverted by disclosing the fact that the aristocratic family is doomed to fall.