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William Faulkner: American Literature
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Using the decay and corruption of the South after the American Civil War (1861-1865) as a background, Faulkner portrayed the tragedy that occurs when the traditional values of a society disintegrate. Some of his chief concerns were the nature of evil and guilt and the relationship between the past and the present. Despite his preoccupation with depravity and violence... Faulkner also wrote of people’s capacity to perform acts of nobility and goodness.
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Unquestionably the most difficult for Faulkner to write, the Benjy section (of April 7, 1928) is ... the most difficult to read. It has been likened to a prose poem, with the succeeding three sections being simply variations on its theme of futility. Because the mentally impaired Benjy lives in a state of timelessness, his report is purely sensuous, and the reader must figure out his own chronology. Faulkner gives two aids: the device of signaling time shifts by alternating the typeface between bold and italic, and the variance of the African American attending Benjy (Roskus and Dilsey ca. 1898; Versh, T.P., and Frony ca. 1910; Luster ca. 1928).
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Understand that Faulkner often uses classic literature such as Shakespearean drama or the Bible as inspiration for his stories. The stories he tells are universal, even though they are mostly set in the South in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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