Poe and Faulkner
Despite the gap in a century or more between the periods when both Edgar Allan Poe and William Faulker were writing, both Poe and Faulkner have been loosely considered representatives of the "Southern Gothic" style of fiction in America. Indeed, pioneering Faulkner critic Cleanth Brooks of Yale University has noted that the connections with Poe's style would limit the way in which Faulkner has been received critically: Brooks is at pains to demonstrate that Faulkner's stories represent "more than an attempt to outdo Edgar Allan Poe, more than the prime example of what has come to be called modern Southern Gothic" (Brooks 15). With an emphasis on grotesquerie and on the spiritual journey of its characters -- often a dark spiritual journey into consciousness of damnation, as in the heavily religious Gothic fiction of the late eighteenth century, or else some form of the supernatural -- "Southern Gothic" is considered a sort of poetic alternative to straightforward realistic fiction. I hope to demonstrate some similarities between the methods of Poe and Faulkner by examining how two representative stories by these authors ("The Tell-Tale Heart" and "Barn Burning" respectively) utilize specific metaphors, patterns of imagery, and symbolism -- along with differences in narrative style and tone -- which show that, despite surface differences, they are really offering a profound vision of the darker side of human nature.
In terms of narrative style first, it is worth noting that this is the element that is most distinctly different between the two stories. Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" is composed as a straightforward dramatic monologue -- in other words, the story is narrated by its protagonist, and the revelation of his character (which turns out to be disturbed and criminal) constitutes the dramatic suspense of the story. This becomes, of course, unbearable just before the story's ultimate denoument: having killed the old man who is his landlord, Poe's unnamed narrator then invites the police in and offers them chairs directly above the site beneath the floorboards where he has hidden the old man's body. The police have heard a "shriek" and been asked to investigate, but they know nothing more than the "suspicion of foul play":
The shriek, I said, was my own in a dream. The old man, I mentioned, was absent in the country. I took my visitors all over the house. I bade them search -- search well. I led them, at length, to his chamber. I showed them his treasures, secure, undisturbed. In the enthusiasm of my confidence, I brought chairs into the room, and desired them here to rest from their fatigues, while I myself, in the wild audacity of my perfect triumph, placed my own seat upon the very spot beneath which reposed the corpse of the victim.
Of course there is an element of dramatic irony here, because the reader (and narrator) know that the body is there but the police do not -- they have no reason to suspect the narrator of anything, since he has given credible excuses for the shriek and the man's absence -- and this is Poe's real point. The story is meant to be an analysis of the narrator's psychology, and what happens is made subordinate (to some extent) to how the story is told. Faulkner's narratorial style is far more conventional in "Barn Burning": although his prose is to a large degree pleonastic and overwrought, in terms of narration and suspense it backs away from the immediacy of Poe's first-person voice. We may consider the description of young Colonel Sartoris Snopes at the story's climax to be representative:
At midnight he was sitting on the crest of a hill. He did not know it was midnight and he did not know how far he had come. But there was no glare behind him now and he sat now, his back toward what he had called home for four days anyhow, his face toward the dark woods which he would enter when breath was strong again, small, shaking steadily in the chill darkness, hugging himself into the remainder of his thin, rotten shirt, the grief and despair now no longer terror and fear but just grief and despair. Father. My father, he thought. "He was brave!" he cried suddenly, aloud but not loud, no more than a whisper: "He was! He was in the war! He was in Colonel Sartoris'...
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