Conclusion

Abstract

The network of fables interwoven to make up A Fable—indeed, the very choice of title for what Faulkner saw as so cumulative and culminating a work—indirectly signals to the reader the potentially fabular aspects of Faulkner’s other writings. If, however, each of his novels may be read as a fable, he seems to have reserved his most overtly fabular effects for the non-Yoknapatawpha novels. The anonymity of so many of the key characters in the final three non-Yoknapatawpha works serves to imbue each of them with a potential ‘everyman’ or, as in the case of the reporter and the convict, ‘no man’ function, while the obviously symbolic connotations of the names assigned to specifically identified characters throughout the non-Yoknapatawpha fiction clearly enhance the fabular qualities of these novels as a group. In one way or another, all five novels constitute fables of creativity appertaining not only to art and the artist but also to the reader and the reader’s responsibilities to the text. That the two pre-Yoknapatawpha novels, Soldiers’ Pay and Mosquitoes, should concern themselves with such issues manifests Faulkner’s uncertainty about the direction his work should take prior to his decision to explore his own ‘little postage stamp of native soil’. On the other hand, Faulkner used the three purely non-Yoknapatawpha novels both to experiment with narrative, stylistic and structural techniques before incorporating them into the Yoknapatawpha fiction and to provide the reader with keys to a body of work which was still being so grossly misunderstood.