William Faulkner’s Thinking About Human Existence as Reflected in Old Man
Abstract:William Faulkner is one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, renowned for his novels and tales about the south. His Old Man is a story about the heroism of a nameless convict who rescues a pregnant woman during a Mississippi flood and assists at the birth of her child, and how he, in the face of hardship, struggles, persists, finishes the painful process of self-defining, and returned to the penitentiary a changed person. This paper, by analyzing the story, tries to find out some of Faulkner’s thinking about human being as individuals and as social members, his concern that human values should be reconstituted, his pride in the southern traditions and his love for the South. Meanwhile, a brief analysis of his narrative strategies is added which to a great extent is the reflection of his beliefs of the nature of time in writing.
Key words:Old Man; meaning of human existence; self-defining; narrative strategies
中图分类号:I106 文献标识码:A 文章编号:1005-5312(2014)26-0065-03
William Faulkner, the Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1950, is doubtlessly among the most important literary figures of the twentieth century. Most of his works have been devoted to the depiction of the people and their life of the south which was undergoing a kind of transition. He writes about the loyalties and other good qualities in the southerners, about his self-consciousness and his skepticism of the postwar America and the world, about the limitations and distortions society impose on human conduct. Old Man is one of them. Many of Faulkner’s characters fail to cleanse their world of guilt, or to achieve lasting solutions to its problems. But some, like the Tall Convict in Old Man, have the desperate courage to try. “Their often bizarre heroism signals the urgency of the challenge life presents to human values, their suffering reveal the need for reconstituting those values and prefigures th
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