Faulknerian Tragedies and Unproductive Frustrations: Love and Death in William Faulkner S Light in August and Absalom, Absalom

Abstract

William Faulkner presents the human predicament, sense of place, and the impact of historical, social, and racial paradigms on human relationships. Faulkner problematized racial segregation, white supremacy, North and South dichotomy, which were manifested in daily relations of the characters. He conflates racial confusion, with grotesque, sexual uncertainty, and homoerotic subtexts to display the impact of past, race, and region on love relations that lead to death in the examined cases. Faulkner creates his fictional Yoknapatawha 1 County where universal human relations and the commonality of human experience could be found. The reader can find love and desire in all its myriad strange manifestations, imbricated politics of sexuality and race, and how his men and women fail and, more rarely, succeed in love. Within this scope, this paper attempts to analyze how the legacy of the Old South and the traumatic impact of Puritanism complicate relations of love and desire through the concepts of love and death in Light in August