The Sound & The Fury and Beloved

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 haunt

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rse, even though she is thousands of miles away from Mississippi. Quentin Compson suffers most strongly in The Sound and the Fury. His personal demon is sexual ambivalence--incestuous feelings toward Caddy but otherwise homosexual--and pushes him toward terror of death and a willful push toward it. Quentin is haunted by the guilt of his failure to fulfill his gentlemanly obligation to the Southern code of honor. He failed to "save" Caddy's honor from the gross attention of Dalton Ames. On the other hand, Quentin's love for her is perverse, and incestuous guilt at his betrayal in thought becomes another source of hauntedness. Memory of all the Compson family is memory of Caddy, and guilt about one is guilt about the other. This is a haunting that torments Quentin at almost every moment of life; his forced alienation from Caddy becomes his alienation from the entire world. Suicide provides the only escape from the family ghosts. From one point of view, Jason IV is not haunted because he lacks the capacity for guilt, and he is uninterested in memory. But he is haunted by a negative presence, which is an understanding that his future is out of his control unless he controls it willfully. Caddy's promiscuity, Benjy's idiocy, and Quenti
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Sound Fury, Civil War, Faulkner's Appendix, Medea Sethe's, Beloved Sethe's, Jason Caddy, Compsons Dilsey, Paul D's, Whoever God, Jason IV, sound fury, civil war, principal effect beloved's, act rage, haunted action, experience ghost, escape family, paul d's, demon act, contradictory feelings, narrative line,
Approximate Word count = 3080
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)