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William Faulkner Vs. Tradition

William Faulkner vs. Tradition
No one likes rejection. It is a common fear that leads many to not accomplish anything. William Faulkner is considered one of America’s most prestigious authors. Unlike earlier American writers, Faulkner wasn’t writing about an established American myth. Instead he wrote about offensive issues. His characters were generally insane or unstable. Faulkner was not a traditional American author. Rejection is what lead Faulkner to challenge traditional literary convections.
Faulkner grew up in a small town in Mississippi. He was rejected all through out childhood. The ladies never paid him any attention. He dropped out of high school because he was cut from the football team, having no further education. In 1918 his high school sweet heart married someone else. Faulkner tried to join the army as a pilot to get away from it all and even they rejected him because he was to short.(Lombardi 58). This life of rejection had an effect on his work. His characters were often rejected, just plain crazy or both. Even if his characters were fine, the way he wrote about them was not.
One of Faulkner’s first novels, As I Lay Dying, is set in Mississippi and deals with a family experiencing the death of their mother, and the attempt they go though to fulfill her last wish. The novel has fifteen different narrators and fifty-nine short monologues. This is not traditional to American literature. No one had done this before. Each of these individual cases of irony vividly adds twists and evidence of Faulkner’s idea of life and death, and his effort to make fun of it. “The use of fifteen narrators do not allow the reader to identify with no single character and force the reader to view the novel in a broad view” (Richardson 63) Though it is very difficult to follow the story at times, the use of fifteen narrators forces the reader to look at the story as whole and not make judgments or inferences on just one narrators prospective. He...