• Dr. Pabitra Kumar Swain
• Neeta Dubey

William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying depict the southern family as the root and spring of human dilemmas and their historical and existential context. The Southern culture predetermines the individual’s reality and shapes his behaviour and outlook on life. The family mediates between the person and his culture, giving its members a fundamental identity with which to project themselves into the world of experience and making it believable and meaningful as a basis for human action in culture. According to Faulkner, the Southern family is caught in the whirling transformations of time and space, eroding its functional vitality. The family in The Sound and the Fury shows how its purpose has collapsed and how its members are inadequate. However, As I Lay Dying depicts a family that survives its impending fragmentation and maintains its predominance and sense of human unity. In The Sound and the Fury, Dilsey’s ‘absurd’ faith ensures a last connection between the family and its members and the outside world. In As I Lay Dying, the Bundren family’s hideous tragi-comedian faith is enlarged. As I Lay Dying is a pre-tragic dramatization of family fate in suspension, while The Sound and the Fury is post-tragic.

Keywords: existential, predetermine, transformation, inadequate, fragmentation

"The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying: Faulkner’s Portrait of the Southern Family", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.10, Issue 8, page no.g865-g873, August-2023, Available :http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2308699.pdf

"The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying: Faulkner’s Portrait of the Southern Family", International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (www.jetir.org | UGC and issn Approved), ISSN:2349-5162, Vol.10, Issue 8, page no. ppg865-g873, August-2023, Available at : http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR2308699.pdf