Depiction Of Privacy And Morality Of An Individual In William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying

Abstract

William Faulkner in his fiction projects something of the paradoxical condition of contemporary man in America. The hero who emerges brings with him both the helplessness of man in the face of the forces of dehumanization, mechanization and conformity and the hopefulness, as futile as it may seem, of triumphing over these very forces. The hero is caught in a now familiar existential dilemma: man victimized by a world he never made and yet yearning for transcendent power and a privately satisfying sense of self. Ihab Hassan’s rebel-victim is

William Faulkner’s typical hero for he combines in one paradoxical figure both the victim hero and the self-asserting hero. Among William  Faulkner’s heroes are examples of this type. They are alienated from society, groaning under imaginary or real grievances. The victim and rebel are two guises under which ‘the hero’ appears, and after the identity of the victim and the victimizer is confused.

William Faulkner contemplated with awe the impressive array of his fiction. Hit literary powers seemed miraculously to have come to him from some mysterious source.Faulkner’s reference to “voices,” though couched in the usual disingenuous phraseology of his public statement raises the crucial, yet thorny, issue of psychogenesis. Those voices, the promptings of the individual’s subconscious, are of great importance in the creative process. But Faulkner, like most writers and their critics, was unwilling to attempt to examine them closely.