Reconstructing Narrative Truth in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury

Abstract

By focusing on William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, I conduct a critical analysis of these texts while also illustrating how they fall under the category of trauma narratives. Drawing upon Mieke Bal's treatment of narrative texts, I examine distinct layers of the narratives, and bring this examination into a relation with Laurie Vickroy's concept of "trauma literature". The relevance of this is to see how Faulkner's trauma narratives transfer mental reactions to trauma into the formal aspects of the texts. While relying on a combination of narratological approaches and trauma studies, I show why the reader is necessitated in the interpretation of the stories. An analysis of the narrative layers will be offered to argue that fragmentation in the structure of the fabula and the story represent, in formal terms, the perplexing experience of trauma, awareness of which is essential when attempting to recreate the "truth" of the stories.