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Overview
Faulkner's Questioning Narratives presents a stimulating discussion of the way William Faulkner's mature fiction works. Focusing on his core novels, including The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, Sanctuary, Light in August, and Go Down, Moses, David Minter looks at the tensions at play within the fiction and at the creativity not only exhibited by the author but also extended to his characters and required of his readers.Faulkner's achievement, Minter contends, was in combining daring experiments in form with searching examinations of grave social, political, and moral problems. His novels change and expand the role of the reader by means of proliferating narratives that lead to questions rather than answers and to approximation rather than resolution.
As his characters talk about, remember, and reconstruct their own sometimes conflicting histories, Faulkner extends to the reader the possibility of creatively revising and completing his narratives. Minter shows how this process at times implicates the reader in the corruption and violence of the story, as when the reader is required to fill in out of his or her own experience the devastating holes left in the narrative of Sanctuary. He also shows how Faulkner's methods undercut the self-contained exclusivity of the New Criticism by integrating the world of the novel with the reader's experience of history and culture.
An eloquent introduction to Faulkner's narrative preoccupations and methods, Faulkner's Questioning Narratives offers indispensable guideposts for navigating his narrative thickets as well as valuable insights into the central motifs and processes that define his fiction.