This study will provide a comparative analysis of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. The study will focus on the statements the books make about modern American life and on how the stories in the book are told (the books as forms of expression). The two books are clearly critical of American society in general, Faulkner for the economic and social forces which were tearing apart the traditional family and community in the South, and Ellison for the racism of the country. In terms of form and style of storytelling, Faulkner offers a more complex set of techniques and strategies than does Ellison, whose first-person narrative in comparison is straightforward but certainly not simple.
Faulkner does not simply see the old South as a wonderful realm of manners and morality, and the new America as a voracious, materialistic and immoral monster swallowing that old South. Faulkner presents a family and a community, however, which were once noble and unified by traditions and conventions based on human rather than primarily material concerns, and he argues that that noble and moral unity is in the process of being destroyed by larger and more inhumane social and economic imperatives. The death of the South is symbolized in the image of the statue: "They approached the square, where the Confederate soldier gazed with empty eyes beneath his marble hand in wind and weather."
While Ellison is similarly critical of American society, his condemnation is more overt than Faulkner's, the latter submerging his social critique in the analysis of the disintegrating family. Ellison's focus on one character as opposed to the several of Faulkner's story gives the former's book a focus which is deliberately missing in Faulkner's. Faulkner divides up the narrative of his novel, further complicating the epic scope of his work and the reality at the core of the family's history. In Ellison, we do have the narra...