Narrative in William Faulkner’s Light in August

Abstract Book of the 9th World Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities

Year: 2025

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Narrative in William Faulkner’s Light in August

Granit Zela

ABSTRACT:

The paper aims to offer insights on the narrative of Faulkner’s Light in August (1932) foregrounding its inventiveness and originality. Although this work of literature is perceived as more conventional in comparison with its predecessors and successors in the Faulknerian oeuvre, the analysis argues that Light in August is very complex in terms of employment of stream of consciousness, typology of narrators, multiple points of views, juxtapositions, flashbacks, tense shifts, typographic experiments and an infinite number of characters which create polyphonic narrative that requires constantly the reader’s close engagement as the scope of fiction is expanded from the family to the town of Jefferson of Yoknapatawpha, Faulkner’s “apocryphal county.

Keywords: William Faulkner, Light in August, Narrative Techniques, Modernist Fiction