One of the best american novels written by an American - Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! 》

Absalom, Absalom! " is Faulkner's most difficult and complex novel, the most epic novel, and an important part of the author's mythical kingdom of Joknapatafa.

It mainly tells the story of the founding of the Sedpan family, a major family in Jefferson, Mississippi, in the southern United States in the 19th century, from prosperity to decline, and from prosperity to decline. The whole story is a patchwork of narrators from several stories who illustrate the tragedy of the Sedpan family's demise from different perspectives.

Many readers feel that it is really a "difficult" work in the process of reading, and the difficulty is not that the text is obscure or endlessly repeated paragraphs, nor is it because the observation is too delicate, but it is difficult to understand the narrative level of the narrator and the narrative pattern of "drama within drama" in the work.

There are many ways to tell the narrative of literary works, and some works only tell one story, so there is no layer to speak of. But some works have stories within stories, so they can form complex narrative layers.

"A character's actions are the object of narration, but the character can also narrate another story in turn, and in the story he tells, of course, another person can also narrate another story."

Absalom, Absalom! The narrative level is like a set box, layer by layer, forming a composite level. The story told by the narrator is a narrative level, and the process of the narrator telling the story, that is, the narrative act itself, is also a narrative level.

The level of faulkner's construction and conception as an implicit author, that is, Faulkner's covert communication with his implicit and authentic reader. Sidepan is the center of the book's dramatic content, while the four narrators, Rosa, Quentin, Compson, and Sliff, are at the center of the novel.

Quentin's character is more complex, and at the beginning of the novel, Quentin is the audience of Rosa and Mr. Compson's narration, the object of communication of the narrator, that is, the narrator is also the narrator at the sub-narrative level.

At the same time, he also plays the role of an external narrator in the super-narrative level, because he strings together the stories of Sedpan told by Rosa and Mr. Compson, and then reconstructs the story of Sedpan with Steve.

Based on the different narratives of the four storytellers, it is difficult for Sedpan and his tragedy to have a grasp of the "authenticity", and their faces appear to be swaying and flickering in different discourses, which is the unreliability of the narrator.

Should the reader trust Miss Rosa, or should they trust anyone else? This is worthy of serious scrutiny and judgment by our readers, which is Absalom, Absalom! " makes people feel obscure and difficult to understand the root cause.

Absalom, Absalom! In "The author arranges four narrators to tell the story of Sedpan, and the four narrators reflect the American people's understanding and views on the rise and fall of slave owners in the South from different angles and at different levels, providing readers with a variety of possibilities for the text of the novel, and triggering people's multiple thinking about the South.