In William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels, a group of characters exists who possess three common characteristics--a closeness to mankind, a realization of the tragedy in life, and a positive response to this tragedy. The term beneficent is used to describe the twenty individuals who possess these traits. The characters are divided into two broad categories. The first includes the white and black primitives who innately possess beneficent qualities. The term primitive describes the individual who exhibits three additional traits--simplicity, nonintellectualism, and closeness to nature. The second group includes characters who must learn the attributes of beneficence in the course of the novel. All the beneficent characters serve as embodiments of the optimism found in Faulkner's fiction.

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This thesis examines eight novels by William Faulkner by means of a critical method based on a concept of landscape. The thesis developed out of a curiosity regarding the vivid pictures that Faulkner's novels evoked in the mind of this reader. These reminded the reader of pictures similar in their vividness to those evoked in childhood by fairy tales and children's literature. In the main, here, ` the vivid Faulknemian pictures are examined from a moral point of view. The critical method follows from the idea of the literary landscape as a holistic entity, 'a prospect such as may be taken in at a glance from one point of view'. The method operates in three stages, and the vivid pictures found in the landscapes of the novels are deemed to function as centres of particular interest. In the first stage of the method, an impressionistic landscape, so called, is established, based on the facts of place, time, society, events and values given in or deducible from the novel. The vivid pictures are noted. The second stage calls for the quantification of the author's technical strategies, and in the third stage the vivid pictures are adopted as the starting points for detailed analyses of one or more aspects of the novel. The method seems to bring into focus a mature, detailed and satisfying reader's landscape which, it is hoped, functions as an R accurate reflection of the author's literary creation.

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The influence of the pre-Civil War Southwestern humorists on the work of William Faulkner has long been hypothesized. But it has received scant critical attention, much of it erroneous or so general as to be almost meaningless. While Faulkner's total vision is more than merely humorous, humor is a significant part of that vision. And the importance of frontier humor to Faulkner's art is further substantiated by the fact that many of his grotesque passages derive from elements of this humor. Frontier humor flourished from I830 to I860, and while a large group of men then flooded American newspapers with contributions, it now survives in anthologies and the book-length collections of its most prominent writers — Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Joseph Glover Baldwin, Johnson Jones Hooper, William Tappan Thompson, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, and George Washington Harris. Their writings illustrate the genre's growth from mere regionalism in eighteenth century diction to the robust and masculine humor in the frontiersman's own language. Harris is the best of these humorists because he has a better sense of incongruity and consistently tells his stories in the earthy vernacular of the frontiersman; and Faulkner himself admires Sut Lovingood, principle character-cum-raconteur of Harris's best work. Therefore, in this thesis I focus on Harris's Sut Lovingood in relation to the Snopes trilogy of Faulkner — his longest unified work and a "chronicle” of Yoknapatawpha County with much frontier humor in it. A major parallel between Faulkner and Harris is their similar use of the story-within-a-story device and their similar technical rendering of the highly figurative and even in Harris's time somewhat stylized language of the frontier. Their common Southern heritage and the lack of change in the post-bellum Southern backwoodsman conduces to a similar milieu. Harris's and Faulkner's recurrent theme of retribution derives from the frontiersman's individualism and from his concern for at least the rudiments of society. Both authors create a large number of frontier characters at and their principal frontier characters are at once superb story tellers and epitomize the best ideals of the American frontier. The purpose of this thesis, then, is to examine the ways in which Faulkner parallels Harris's frontier humor. Having established Harris as the best writer in his group, I discuss the two authors' structures and techniques, their milieus and themes, and their characters. The trilogy's similarities with and deviations from Harris's Sut Lovingood help to illuminate Faulkner's artistry as well as to suggest the strength of Harris's influence on Faulkner. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This study explores the nature and extent of Sherwood Anderson's influence upon William Faulkner. It demonstrates, through the use of the comparative method, that Anderson's influence is a major and continuous one. The early New Orlean Sketches strongly echo and, at times, imitate Anderson's work. Faulkner's first novel, Soldiers' Pay, was not only written at Anderson's suggestion but also published through his influence. In Mosquitoes, Faulkner closely modeled his main character after Anderson. Anderson helped Faulkner to organize some of the "folk" material in that novel. Faulkner's early use of negro characters to embody a kind of sane, healthy alternative to the world of the whites may well have been encouraged by Anderson's example. Furthermore, Anderson played an important role, at a crucial period In Faulkner's development, in directing him to the fictional use of the Yoknapatawpha material. He led Faulkner to realize that universality in art could grow out of regional material. Faulkner's sense of community and his exploration of the individual's search for community so closely resemble Anderson's as to suggest some indebtedness. Faulkner's dramatization of the effects of the destruction of that community by the forces of modern commerce and industry is rendered in terms similar to Anderson's. Also, Faulkner's creation of an idyllic, rural world in contrast to the mechanistic, urban world resembles that in Anderson's stories of horses and men. And Faulkner uses Anderson's idea that the world of horses is a totally male world elsewhere in his fiction. There is a strong resemblance, finally, in Faulkner's and Anderson's concept of the grotesque: for both, it concerns truth and its consequences in the individual's Isolation and behaviour. In fact, it is argued that Anderson's "theory of the grotesque" provides a rationale for the larger structure of some of Faulkner's most important work. For these reasons, it is concluded that Anderson was an important force in shaping the form and content of Faulkner's art. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This study analyzes these stories in their original and later forms, both to discover the types of changes Faulkner made and to determine whether or not he followed any pattern in the revisions.

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Le projet de création Le chasseur inconnu est un roman dont la narration problématique – au nous – constitue la principale particularité. Campé dans un village non identifié dont les habitants se réunissent chaque semaine pour débattre de leurs problèmes et pour potiner, ce texte de fiction se déploie grâce aux voix de narrateurs mystérieux et à leur ton parfois aux limites de l’absurde. L’essai réflexif qui suit le roman propose une étude des enjeux et des effets de la narration au nous dans la nouvelle Une rose pour Emily de William Faulkner. / The novel Le chasseur inconnu’s most defining characteristic is its narration ;  an unnatural we narration. The story takes place in an unknown town where villagers meet every week to discuss their problems and to gossip. As the plot unfolds, the mysterious narrators and their absurd voices become increasingly important and stress the narrative peculiarity of the novel. The essay following Le chasseur inconnu offers a study of we narration in William Faulkner’s short story A Rose for Emily.