Early Works of Faulkner

William Faulkner is one of the greatest of American writers. Critically, there is no doubt about that. But his views on certain topics were sure to cause controversy. Witness his views on slavery. Karl (461) discusses Faulkner's views on slavery as expressed in an interview with the New York Herald Tribune. In this interview, Faulkner thinks that "negroes would be better off under slavery, in a benevolent autocracy." He says that the Negroes would be better off because they would have someone to look after them. He doesn't think it would be as good for the white people as for the negroes to have slavery come back. Faulkner says that the negroes are "like children in many of their reactions." When asked about Negro artists, Faulkner responded, "Well, most artists are children, too" (Phillips 19).

This is not a good picture of Faulkner on a subject upon which he wrote so much, and perhaps it is unjustified. Perhaps Faulkner was speaking "tongue in cheek," since he did not at all believe that the artist is like a child. Quite the contrary, he held an exalted view of the artist as a maker and a poet, and his favorite writers were masters of the imagination. we have to conclude that while Faulkner's public statements about race would create outrage, they would not at all coincide with the way h

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mself a man (Kreiswirth 117). Clan rather than class forms the basic social unit in Faulkner's world. Pride in family and reverence for ancestors are far more powerful motives in behavior than any involvement with class. These motives are to be expected in a society where the past clings to the present like a habitual lover, neither relinquished nor enjoyed. Each of the major families in Faulkner's world comes to signify a distinct kind of conduct that is based on a moral code. When a character like Jason Compson, for example, turns from clan loyalty to class aggrandizement, he is repudiating, Faulkner implies, not only his immediate inheritance but an entire mode of life. It is through this breakup of the clans that Faulkner charts the decay of the traditional South. Though the Compsons, Sartorises, the McCaslins, all landowners of prominence, begin roughly on the same social level, their histories from the Civil War serve radically different purposes. Their responses to modern life seem to illustrate the various moral courses that are, or were, open to the South: the chivalric recklessness and self-destruction of the Sartorises: the more extreme and tragic disintegration of the Compsons and, by way of resolution, the
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Approximate Word count = 2196
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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