Tools in the carpenter's shop: a study of faulkner's use of the christian myth

The thesis describes the consistent thematic use of and the steady artistic development in the Christian myth as it appears in William Faulkner's novels. Although I concentrate on the use of Biblical allusions, other mythical references are examined when they become a part of the pattern described, as in Soldier's Pay and The Sound and the Fury. A Fable is examined first because its explicit allegorical use of the myth clearly indicates the direction Faulkner takes in the earlier stages of his artistry. It presents the fundamental conflict between "Authority," which would shape man in its own image, and the corporal-Christ's belief in the primacy of the whole being unconstrained by ideology. Such belief is "capable of containing all of time and all of man” in one unutterable vision. In order to emphasize Faulkner's development toward this articulation of the-myth, I analyze his "apprentice works," Soldier's Pay, Mosquitoes, and Sartoris, and then the later novels in which the myth is a primary element, The Sound and the Fury and Light in August. Each of these novels rejections institutions which repress man's self-expression and contains a movement toward the "timeless moment" of a vision of the essential wholeness of life. In Soldier's Pay that moment occurs amidst the sterility and fragmentation that society has instilled into Donald Mahon. At the end of the novel, the Negro church service overwhelms Joe Gilligan and Rector Mahon with its effusion of a perfect conjunction of life's elements, "sweat,...sex and death and damnation," and it enables them to experience their own profound humanity. Mosquitoes juxtaposes the superficiality and impotence aboard the Nausikaa with Fairchild's comprehension of the same primary unity of "the hackneyed accidents which make up this world." Sartoris portrays Bayard's rejection of life because of his inability to fuse his family tra- dition with the meaninglessness of his own war experiences. Then, foreshadowing the rebirth motif in Light in August, Bayard dies on the day his son is born; but his wife rejects the Sartoris tradition by naming the child Benbow Sartoris, thus uniting the placidity of her own life as a Benbow with the energy of the Sartorises. In The Sound and the Fury and Light in August, both poles of the conflict are expressed in terms of the Christian myth. The Compson narrators all have rigid perceptual frameworks which are linked with a view of Christianity as an oppressive ideology. In contrast, Dilsey's experience in the Easter service is an expression of the acceptance of the whole man which allows one to see the integrity of life and is timeless because it subsumes all of time, "de beginnin’ en de endin,'” into an instant of perception. Light in August deals with society's imposition of its definitions on individuals and Joe, like Christ, is martyred because his life is perceived as a threat to its pattern of order. Then, in the conjunction of Joe's death with the birth of Lena's baby, one sees a union of the suffering brought by "evil" and the ecstasy of creation. Both poles, nativity and crucifixion, are part of the Christian myth; both are part of life itself and when conjoined, bring a comprehension of the divinity of life experienced in its wholeness. Thus, in Faulkner's works, the Christian myth becomes, in Mark Schorer's words, "a large controlling image...which gives philosophical meaning to the facts of ordinary life." The thematic consistency with which the myth is used underscores that meaning.

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