Create a new account

It's simple, and free.

The Sound & The Fury and Beloved

The purpose of this research is to compare and contrast the theme of hauntings in the novels The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner and Beloved by Toni Morrison. The plan of the research will be to set forth the background and context for the presentation of a narrative that is built around the difficulty of forgetting or even setting aside memories informed by guilt and the ghosts of action, attitudes, and words that have contributed to the very persona of the haunted one. Once this context is established, the manner in which Faulkner and Morrison accomplish a convincing evocation of character as recipient of supernatural or hyper-unnatural psychological and emotional experience will be discussed.

An exercise in comparison of decisively representative works of two American Nobel laureates might seem to be a job of setting up frameworks of reference and attempting to match, point for point, their view of post-Reconstruction America. Faulkner's milieu is Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, while Morrison's is Ohio. Faulkner's perspective is that of a white Southern man, Morrison's that of a black Northern slave woman. But in both Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Morrison's Beloved can be seen a theme of haunting--of character, of social environment, of experience of the aftermath of the Civil War, which is itself a symbol of deeper divisions of human experience based on America's racial divide.

The Sound and the Fury can be interpreted as patterned by haunted action and experience. One clue is in the title, derived from the passage in Macbeth that describes life in terms of its progress toward ghostly status, "but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more: it is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.(Macbeth, V.vi). The Compsons, who are the subject of The Sound and the Fury, are haunted individuall...

Page 1 of 12 Next >

More on The Sound & The Fury and Beloved...

Loading...
APA     MLA     Chicago
The Sound & The Fury and Beloved. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 17:24, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1711963.html