william faulkner absalom absalom analysis

Closely related to this pattern that Broughton sees in Faulkner’s stories are his tireless experimentation with form and his characteristic style. Out of this need spring human capacities for mature moral freedom as well as for tragic destructiveness. Human beings need meaning they need to impose patterns on the motion of life. Broughton demonstrates that the Faulknerian universe is characterized essentially by motion. Although the way into Faulkner suggested by Simpson and Broughton is only one of many, it seems particularly helpful to the reader who wishes to begin thinking about Faulkner’s whole literary career. The immense quantity of critical commentary on Faulkner provides several satisfying ways of viewing and ordering the central concerns of his novels. Panthea Broughton makes this view of Faulkner more concrete: In Faulkner’s world, characters struggle to find or make meaning, exposing themselves in various ways to the danger of spiritual self-destruction, of losing their own souls in the effort to find a way of living in a universe that does not provide meaning. One critic argues that Faulkner, like the greatest of his contemporaries, dramatizes in most of his novels some version of the central problem of modern man in theWest, how to respond to the recognition that man has no certain knowledge of a stable transcendent power that assures the meaning of human history.

All of Faulkner’s greatest works were written before the first explosion of the atomic bomb, yet in all of them there is an awareness of the threat of annihilation of which the bomb may be only a symptom: a kind of spiritual annihilation.

William faulkner absalom absalom analysis