A Study of William Faulkner :　Quest for　an Image of universe

Sartoris is the third novel of William Faulkner. With this book he discovers his own world and begins the creation of Yoknapatawpha saga. The repetitive reference to The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! means that they are among his most energetic works and they most manifest his ambitious trial of establishing his art of fiction by presenting his “cosmos.” Several peculiarities of his art of fiction annoy the readers at first, such as telling the stories from present to past, and apparent disclosure of present events from the readers. But they are justified when we see that his imaginative power lies in his conception of time. Faulkner does not tell his stories chronologically or as the sequence of cause and effect. Time is not a linear process in his world. In the case of Darl Bundren in As I Lay Dying we can see human consciousness trying to find out the meaning of living self by its pure perception. But man fails to acknowledge his significance within the immediate present. In that case he can only establish his physical existence but not as spiritual and mental being. In the light of psychological fact, there needs memory for man to signify himself and objects with sensible associations and meanings, since even words are fundamentally memory. Time exists when individuals come to be aware of it by the help of memory to indicate the change of events. Man’s consciousness is also within time. This means time is a prepetual present in which accumulating past and hope and fear of future coexist indivisibly. This conception of time determines Faulkner’s way of telling. Present is perceived only as outword movements and on the other hand past events are ready to be told through someone’s memory. Fulkner applies his time theory not only to evoke personal memory but also to the memory of the land. In Absalom, Abalom! the readers acquire, through the rise and fall of Sutpen family, a whole history of Deep South. The memory of the land is not finished and reduced into a solutuon but it is the kind of memory assertingits existence in the present. Time in Faulknerian world is not rigid and determined but it is conceived as duration. Time is, in other words, experiences both personal and social. Once an event has happened, it indissolubly chains itself to the succeeding events and exists in the present suspended in organic structure with the flux of universe. So that the sin of the land, that is rejection of Negro blood, is a present reality of the land, not finished, expiated and done in the past. Faulkner shows his great interest in the function of words. As I Lay Dying is the book devoted to prove the inability of words to keep intinate relation with doings. As shown symbolically by the word “Negro”, words or logical thinking to determine objects as things fail to catch the elusive reality of objects, since the intellectual function of mind is intended to acknowledge world as generalized postulates. In Faulkner’s world important truth is most accessed by pre-verbal experiences and by sympathy