William Cuthbert Falkner began his life on September 25, 1897 in Mississippi. He was born into a prominent family, which owned banks and a railway. Mammy Callie, his childhood nurse, made an important contribution to his works. The stories he would tell him stayed with him throughout his life and even inspired some of his own. Although his greatest influence was his great-grandfather, who everyone called the Old Colonel. Falkner decided from a young age that he would write just like the Old Colonel. However he was not a scholar, in the fourth grade he became tired of school and eventually dropped out for the second time until the eleventh grade. Falkner did many jobs before his first manuscript was published. He joined Britain's Royal Air Force and added a "u" to his surname, to sound more British, but would never see a day of combat. After his failed attempt to become a pilot, he returned to Oxford and became postmaster at the University of Mississippi Post Office. When he was fired for throwing away his mail, he moved to New Orleans and began writing. Publishers didn't like his first book Flags in the Dust, so he edited it and renamed it Sartoris. Although he had a rocky start, his writing career soon took off with his second book, The Sound and the Fury (Harmon). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayWilliam Faulkner creates an entire world based on his own experiences. He writes mostly about Mississippi during its transition from the Old South, to the Civil War, to the industrial era. Early in his life Faulkner said that he "realized that he could write all his life and never completely exhaust his little stamp of the land of his birth" (Ferris 6). Although he gives the fictional name Yoknapatawapha County to his main setting, he is actually based on Lafayette County where he spent much of his life. “Faulkner grew up surrounded by traditional lore: family and regional stories, rural folk wisdom and humor, heroic and tragic accounts of the War Between the States, and tales of the hunting code and ideal conduct of the Southern gentleman” (William Faulkner) . This history, combined with his desire to be part of the modern world, creates a conflict within Faulkner that emerges in his work. As biographer Singal states, "Throughout his life Faulkner would struggle to reconcile these two divergent approaches to selfhood: the Victorian impulse toward unity and stability that he inherited as a son of rural Southern gentry, and the modernist drive towards the multiplicity and change he had absorbed very early in his career as a self-identifying member of the international artistic avant-garde. Faulkner's need to present traditional Southern people through modern techniques characters come to life through a variety of methods. Three of the most effective techniques used by Faulkner are his ability to capture the dialect and mannerisms of his characters, the character's need to dwell on their past, and a stream-of-consciousness approach to great part of his narrative. The South of Faulkner's works is filled with the trappings of their time: an agricultural society, Southern belles and gentlemen, racial inequality, and especially the rural Southern dialect. Faulkner presents a realistic portrait of the South he grew up in using examples of Southern language, including the speech of both the upper and lower classes. Faulkner establishes aunique voice that is recognizable by its distinct vocabulary, pronunciation, and lack of grammatical form, which is unique to the South. Faulkner uses this convention perfectly in “Barn Burning”. From the first time he uses the voice of Colonel Sartoris Snopes, it is clear who this child is and what his likely fate in life is. Describing his father's enemy as “ours! mineand his both! (“Barn” 3), through these five words many details of the boy's education are highlighted. When Abner warns Sartoris that "You must learn to cling to your own blood or you won't have blood clinging to you" ("Barn Burning" 8), Faulkner shows in a single sentence how Abner behaves towards his son. Faulkner's dialect is effective both as a literary device and as a link between Southern language, culture, and history. Faulkner manages to represent the southern dialect that is consistently present in all of his stories. In his writing, this can be described by traits such as an intentional misspelling or the use of Miss together with a woman's name, such as Miss Emily. Linguists such as Raven McDavid have deduced that older and less educated, as well as many blacks, have demonstrated the use of improper past tense verbs such as div for dive, growed for grow, and riz for rise in their studies of Southern languages ​​(McDavid 264 -280). Accordingly, in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, there is an immense sign on the Second Negro Baptist Church that reads "He Is Ris." Another feature of Faulkner's language common to Southern dialects is the occasional loss of the "r" sound, as in the words "baun" for born and "bastud" for bastard. These words, along with dozens of others that appear in many of Faulkner's stories, help solidify the speaker and the dialect in the reader's mind. Faulkner's depiction of Southern speech in writing very closely follows the actual linguistic parameters of the Southern Plains, or proper Southern, dialect according to Raven McDavid's classification. So, his written dialogue is a faithful copy of the Southern dialect he actually speaks. Faulkner makes a great effort to show all the nuances of this dialect, even though many of them cannot be perceived through writing alone. For example, clues presented by facial and bodily expressions must be balanced with written equivalents, such as pronunciation, grammar, and word usage. Faulkner's works also describe different perceptions of time. Many of his main characters have neither a present nor a future; they are trapped in their own past. “As for Faulkner's heroes, they never look forward” (Sartre 91). One of Faulkner's most powerful and disconnected characters is Joe Christmas, in Light in August. The first description of the protagonist is "rootless" (Light 21), and his memories begin at the age of five, when he was adopted from an orphanage. He therefore has no concrete knowledge of his heritage and goes through a painful identity crisis. To his dismay, his adoptive parents, the MacEacherns, mercilessly impose zealous religious beliefs on him. Always different from others, he becomes an outcast, and is called a nigger so often that he loses all sense of self-esteem, abuse from his family and racist insults from his peers mark every memory and he cannot escape his past. Joe Christmas "is not determined by his past, he is his past" and "has no idea of ​​his future" (Poullion Joe). develops negative associations towards women, because the only time he sees them is in church. He falls in love with Bobbie, the waitress, but his original distrust towards women is strengthened when he discovers that she is a prostitute. Past impressions, especially childhood impressions, Faulkner shows that the present issubmerged in the past, that what has been lived in the present is what has been lived in the past" (Poullion 80). Once Joe killed MacEachern, he "entered the road that was running for fifteen years" (Light 223). During Joe's time on the run, he loses his grasp of reality and time. “He thought it was loneliness he was trying to escape and not himself” (Light 226). For a while he gains some stability in his relationship with Johanna Burden, and she threatens his life with religious conversion. He is reminded of her story again and can't handle this relationship, so he kills her and runs away again. He loses his grip on time and reality, once again. “He could never know when he would pass from one to the other, when he would find himself asleep without remembering having gone to bed, or find himself awake without remembering having woken up” (Light 333). He doesn't think about eating or sleeping, and in two bouts of madness he even demands to know the day of the week. “It was as if now and finally he had a real and urgent need to spend the days spent toward a purpose without failing or exceeding” (Light 335). The secret of Joe's past is revealed at the end of the novel, after he is captured and accused of murder. The pieces are put together just for the reader. It is claimed that he was the illegitimate son of a black circus worker and that his grandfather, Doc Hines, was the caretaker of the orphanage. Joe is never given this crucial information, and it is only when Percy Grimm castrates and kills him that he can truly rest in peace. "Then his face, his body, everything, seemed to collapse, to fall in on itself and from the torn clothes around his hips and loins the retained black blood seemed to flow like a liberated breath" (Light 465). His past is the permanent thorn in his side that prevents him from seeing his future, or even his present. In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner creates a mentally retarded character named Benjy Compson. Among the novel's four narrators, Benjy's vivid observations combine to paint the most revealing picture of the Compson family. Benjy recounts the most important events of his life such as the change of name in early childhood, the awareness of having been castrated and the transformation of Caddy. His awareness of his surroundings and his aversion to change are not clear to others, because he has difficulty expressing himself. It has no sense of chronological time. His narrative is made up of conflicting memories, constantly jumping from one thought to another without any indication. Overall, Benjy's memories add a dreamlike quality to the novel: "The past takes on a kind of super-reality; its contours are hard and clear, unchanging" (Sartre 89). What confuses the reader does not confuse Benjy, as his entire existence is a collage of his disjointed memories. Benjy can only use his senses to register emotions and relies primarily on his hearing and smell. His past is “sensation” (Sartre 48). He almost instinctively knows when changes have occurred in his routine. For example, he likes the fact that his sister Caddy always smells like trees. On his wedding day, Benjy realizes, “Caddy hugged me and hugged her shining veil, and I couldn't smell the trees anymore and I started to cry” (Sound 40). He knows that she will leave home and he will be left without the only person who has ever considered his feelings. As he loses his sister he also loses the only other thing he loves, his pasture. "He was lying on the ground under the window screaming. We sold Benjy's pasture so Quentin can go to Harvard" (Sound 94). His endless continuum of memories transforms his dysfunctional family background into a prison of despair. Benjy Compson, in The Screamand the Fury, and Joe Christmas, in Light in August, are trapped in their bitter past, which proves that “the misfortune lies in its being bound to time” (Sartre 88). Consequently, the fixation of time is always present in Faulkner's works to emphasize the stranglehold of the past. This fixation is usually coupled with a total disjointed timeline. This meandering stream of consciousness can be used to show an important aspect of a character or situation. This is the premise for "A Rose for Emily", one of Faulkner's most read stories. Faulkner recounts the events of Emily's life out of order. It does this through a mourner at their funeral sharing their memories, in the order they remember them. Through these memories Faulkner reveals the city's feelings towards him. These events do not follow one another logically, the reader is kept in the dark to create suspense. Instead, the story begins at the end, with the mourners gathering at Miss Emily's house, and jumps from one time period to another. Faulkner “juxtaposed the lives of several characters in scenes that did not proceed in a linear or chronological manner” (McHaney 50), and this slow reveal is created to place events in order of importance and not just in a linear fashion. Faulkner believes Emily's pride and presence, in dealing with the aldermen, is more important than her past, so he tells how she "defeated them, on horseback and on foot" (Emily 52), before explaining his past. He then goes back thirty years, to further explain his hold on the community. By telling the story of the aldermen fixing the smell in Emily's house, Faulkner is slowly revealing the clues to what is the ultimate discovery. He then reveals Homer Baron and how the town thought he would never "think seriously about a Northerner, a day laborer" (Emily 55). Homer was Emily's only real suitor and had left town shortly before the smell. The final clue is revealed by his purchase of the arsenic and his ability to circumvent the law to obtain it. “Miss Emily stared at him, her head tilted back to look at him eye for eye, until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up” (Emily 56). Instead of outright stating that Homer was the reason for the smell, Faulkner lets the reader find out by telling Homer's story after he accounts for the smell. Faulkner's gradual exposition of Emily's character, through the memory of the mourner, subtly foreshadows the shock. and the horror of finding the monster in the matriarch of Jefferson, Mississippi. In this way, the reader learns what the town thinks of her, before the discovery, and the feelings that allowed Emily to get away with what she wanted for so long. The people of the city never expect this turn of events. Emily meant so much to the town that they could never suspect her of anything other than eccentricity. This really shows how their feelings for her have clouded their perception of her. By making the reader discover the true sequence of events, Faulkner ensures that the reader has a vision that the city does not see. While the citizens may not be expecting Homer's corpse, the reader is. While the stream of consciousness can be difficult to follow, it adds a sense of accomplishment in uncovering Emily's secret before the town does. If Faulkner had used a linear plot in the story, some of its meaning and enjoyment would have been lost. If there had been no detective work, then the story would have simply been the story of an old lady who was a monster. The refinement of his techniques, over the years. 1969