Immortalizing the Human Spirit: Analyzing Faulkner through Schopenhauer

Abstract

As a writer who composed some of the most formidable American prose of the twentieth century, William Faulkner wrote modernist novels the numerous complexities and ambiguities of which require continued decipherment. Critics have attempted to interpret If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem; Absalom, Absalom!; As I Lay Dying; The Sound and the Fury; and Light in August through various critical approaches, yet none has successfully pinpointed Faulkner's aesthetic philosophy. This dissertation satisfies the critical deficiency by studying Faulkner's work through the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, namely the latter's view of reality as will and representation, or truth and illusive manifestation. Ultimately, this endeavor leads to the discovery that Faulkner used literature to commemorate and immortalize the human spirit in its continual fight to persevere against the constraining nature of causality. Analyzing the themes and formal permutations of each novel, this dissertation notes Faulkner's concern with the spatial and temporal boundaries characteristic of the human condition and the limits they present for Reason and the maintenance of joy. The argument identifies Faulkner's Schopenhauer-esc advocacy for one's temporary denial of the "individual will" or ego in moments of aesthetic transcendence that permit an alleviation of suffering. This previously overlooked connection between Schopenhauer and Faulkner recognizes the author's desire to produce the conditions necessary for the reader to glimpse the universal will in an extension of the present moment.