【正文】 Southern family. A number of his ancestors were involved in the MexicanAmerican War, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction, and were part of the local railroad industry and political scene. Faulkner showed signs of artistic talent from a young age, but he became bored with his classes later and never finished high school. Faulkner grew up in the town of Oxford, Mississippi, and eventually returned there in his later years and purchased his famous estate. Oxford and the surrounding area were Faulkner’s inspiration for the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. These locales became the setting for a number of his works. Faulkner’s ―Yoknapatawpha novels‖ include The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses (Li Wenjun, 2) . Faulkner was particularly interested in the decline of the South after the Civil War. Many of his novels explored the deterioration of the Southern aristocracy after the destruction of its wealth and way of life during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Faulkner populated Yoknapatawpha County with the skeletons of old mansions and the ghosts of great men, patriarchs and generals from the past whose aristocratic families fail to live up to their historical greatness. Beneath the shadow of past grandeur, these families attempt to cling to old Southern values, codes, and myths that are corrupted and out of place in the reality of the modern world. The families in Faulkner’s novels are rife with failed sons, disgraced daughters, and smoldering resentments between whites and blacks in the aftermath of AfricanAmerican slavery (Gao wei, 129) . Faulkner’s reputation as one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century was largely due to his highly experimental style. Faulkner was a pioneer in literary modernism, dramatically diverging from the forms and structures traditionally used in novels before his time. Faulkner often employs stream of consciousness narrative, discards any notion of chronological order, uses multiple narrators, shifts between the present and past tense, and tends toward impossibly long and plex 攀枝花 學院本科畢業(yè)論文 Body 3 sentences. Not surprisingly, these stylistic innovations make some of Faulkner’s novels incredibly challenging to the reader. However, these bold innovations paved the way for countless future writers to continue to experiment with the possibilities of the English language. For his efforts, Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949. He died in Mississippi in 1962(Li Wenjun, 3). The novel The Sound and the Fury, was first published in 1929, Faulkner described the human experience by portraying events and images subjectively, through several different characters’ respective memories of their childhood (Gao Wei, 130). The novel’s stream of consciousness style is extreamely opaque. Despite its formidable plexity, The Sound and the Fury was an overpowering and moving novel. It was generally regarded as Faulkner’s most important and remarkable literary work. Ⅱ . A Brief Introduction to the Novel The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner’s fourth novel, was his first masterpiece, and was considered his finest work. Depicting the decline of the oncearistocratic Compson family, the novel was divided into four parts, each told by a different narrator. According to Faulkner, the story began with a vision of a little girl’s muddy drawers as she climbed a tree to look at death while her brothers lack the courage. The first section was told from the point of view of Benjy Compson, a thirtythreeyearold idiot, and recounted the earliest events in the novel use flashback. As an idiot, Benjy was the key to the novel’s title, which alluded to Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth. For the most part, his language was simple—sentences were short, the vocabulary was simple. It was not difficult to read this section. However, sensory stimuli in the present brought him back to another time and place in his past instantly because the idiot had no concept of time or place. Most of his memories involved his sister, Caddy, who was the central character of the novel. Benjy’s earliest depicted memory, from 1898 (when Benjy was three years old), established the essence of her character—the children were ignorant of the death of their grandmother, Damuddy, 攀枝花學院本科畢業(yè)論文 Body 4 and Caddy was the only Compson child brave enough to climb the pear tree and looked through the window at the funeral wake while her brothers standed below, gazing up at her muddy drawers, which were soiled earlier when they were playing in a creek adjoining the Compson estate. Most of Benjy’s other memories also focused on Caddy, who alone among the Compsons genuinely cared for Benjy. Key memories regarding Caddy include a time when she used perfume, when she lost her virginity, and her wedding. Benjy also recalled his change of the name (from Maury to Benjamin) in 1900, his Brother Quentin’s suicide in 1910, and the sequence of events at the gate, which leaded to his being castrated, happened also in 1910. The second section recounted the story from Quentin Compson’s perspective. Even though the presentday of this section was almost eighteen years prior to the presentday of Benjy’s section, it nevertheless followed roughly the chronological development of the novel, for while many of Benjy’s recollections were of their early childhood, most of Quentin’s flashbacks recorded their adolescence, particularly Caddy’s dawning sexuality. Quentin’s section took place on the day he mited suicide, and the present we followed his wanderings around Boston (he is a student at Harvard University) as he fastidiously prepared for his death. Like Benjy, he was ob