Decoding The Sound And The Fury From The Perspective Of Trauma Theory

As a representative of American southern literature,William Faulkner created numerous southern novels in his whole life.But among all the books he writes,The Sound and the Fury is his most devoted and most cherished one.The novel breaks his normal chronological narration and adopts a more complicated narrative strategy.It represents Faulkner’s maturity in writing a novel which is also considered as a great American classic.In his works,elegies for the declining American old southern society and pitiful sigh for tragic fates of characters in Yuknapatow are permeated everywhere.The tragic fates of his characters either come from personal tragedy or collective tragedy within certain historic background.From domestic research,there are few papers interpreting his works from the perspective of Trauma theory except Light in August and Absalom,Absalom.In The Sound and the Fury,Faulkner narrates a tragic story of an old noble Compson’s family in which every character suffers from his own traumatic feeling.The whole family is like a cursed one where trauma is a phantom occurring by fits and the original trauma falls into the victim’s psyche and then is transferred from generation to generation.Reasons that lie behind are both personal,historical and cultural.The disorganized family and the elapsed old south glory bring about a series of terrible consequences which are inflicted on the third generation’s members thus the three brothers in Compson’s family respectively embody symptoms of traumatic experiences.As a newly developed one,Trauma theory has received a great attention since the publication of Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience.Later its content has been broadened by some trauma scholars like Judith Herman.The present paper aims to adopt Trauma theory to interpret the great tragedy of The Sound and the Fury from three dimensions namely trauma symptoms,trauma causes and unsuccessful trauma recovery so as to provide an incisive insight into the personal,historical,cultural and family reasons that result in every character’s tragic fate.The declining old south American society and the obsolete Puritanism together with the hidden family incest aggravate the tragic fate of the family members.The broken post-bellum South meets its difficulty in adjusting to a new way of life which causes American southerns’ traumatic identity formation.Three brothers reveal individual traumatic symptom and try to escape from it while all failed.Though this novel is tragic,by adopting traumatic interpretation,this paper aims at inspiring people to live positively and at the same time highlighting the real intention of Faulkner,that is to alert human beings to look ahead and embrace the future.The paper is arranged into six chapters.The first chapter is an introduction which gives brief introduction to William Faulkner and The Sound and the Fury together,its literature review and originality as well as framework statements.The second chapter gives introduction of Trauma theory which comprises its definition,development,symptoms and recovery.The third chapter explores the main traumatic symptoms of three brothers.Benjy is haunted by intrusion;Quentin is reduced into constriction and Jason is hyperarousal.The fourth chapter states main personal causes of three brothers’trauma.Benjy suffers from disconnection with people;Quentin suffers from indulgence in the past and Jason suffers from being betrayed by all.In addition,it reveals the historical and cultural together with a family factor that post-civil war south,obsolete Puritanism and a hidden incest all lead to the trauma.The fifth chapter reveals the three common reasons lie behind three brothers’ unsuccessful recovery:the lack of a healing relationship;their inability to find a survivor mission and incapability to establish a safe environment.The sixth chapter is a conclusion part.