zed hardly as desperate as Quentin's, as determined as Caddy's, as plaintive as Mrs. Compson's, as frenetically self justifying as Jason's. But his break from his family is irrevocable, not to be discussed, not even, as the reader discovers, with the family. One can, however, envision Jason Compson's seeking out contact with Quentin after the novel ends, if only to embarrass her in her new life.
Differences in the way the issue of family conflict is treated in The_Sound_and_the_Fury and The_Professor's_House can be traced in significant part to differences in tone. As Faulkner spins the tale, Compson family conflict involves intensely overt hostility, while Cather's St. Peters, particularly the Professor, experience their conflict almost entirely internally or apart from one another. They are less exhibitionists of style than the Compsons, although both the Compsons and the St. Peters are plagued by a sense of isolation which is the result of conflict that is acted upon. The families created by Cather and Faulkner are, as Tolstoy might have it, unhappy each in their own way. Moreover, the techniques that Faulkner and Cather employ to describe familial unhappiness demonstrate a way of thinking about conflict and cohesion that implies a particular world view.
It may seem remarkable that the Faulknerian literary vision, grounded as it is in the vocabulary, imagery, and history of the American South, should be considered as among the more profound commentaries on the verities of the whole of the modern world. Yoknapatawpha County is deceptively, cunningly parochial; Irving Howe notes that Faulkner created a special fictional world "not merely as a strategy in narrative but also as an actual motive for composition."1 Yoknapatawpha County, locus of dramatic action in his stories, has been widely regarded at once as emblematic of the whole of human experience and as representative of its creator's personal history.
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