Abstract
Faulkner expresses his own code of values; there are a number of such old fashioned virtues as honor, courage, generosity of spirit, and compassion that he admires; but he is too complex a novelist to impose this code on his characters. Intensely curious about people of all sorts, the evil as well as the good, the degenerate as well as the so-called normal, he portrays them with a genuine effort at imaginative understanding of what basically motivates their lives. Even his worst villains, a Popeye, a Flem Snopes, a Jason Compson, is endowed with some redeeming human trait. Even a collection of stories like Go Down, Moses bears out the impression of Faulkner’s universality of vision. He is aware of the continuing power of the past on the lives of the present generation and its shaping influence on the future. His sense of cultural continuity, his reverent but not uncritical evaluation of the Southern historical past, his respect for the deeply-rooted myths and mores of the folk in Yoknapatawpha, clearly link him in part with the conservative outlook.1
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References
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© 1971 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Glicksberg, C.I. (1971). Faulkner’s World of Love and Sex. In: The Sexual Revolution in Modern American Literature. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-3236-0_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-3236-0_9
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