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Stream of Consciousness
Chapter 4
Explanation and Analysis:
The novel's style is winding and experimental, drawing on many of the techniques of modernism. Faulkner jumps from character to character, from past to present, and from one narrative technique to another. For instance, he describes Joe Christmas's day after killing Joanna a few chapters before he reveals more clearly how the murder took place. In between, he delves at length into both characters' pasts before catching back up with them in the present.
This jumping around does not make the book disorganized, even if it does make it confusing at times. Rather, by moving through the story in a nonlinear fashion, Faulkner replicates the events of the plot as the characters experience them. Rarely do readers make sense of things as they are happening and then move on from them entirely; in this way, Faulkner echoes the way that memories come back to haunt a person in real life, for example, or the way that different people can come away from the same event with completely different interpretations of what happened.
In addition to breaking narrative conventions, Faulkner also breaks the conventions of genre and even language. For example, when he can't find exactly the right word, he invents neologisms such as "branchshadowed" and "womanpinksmelling." He starts Chapter 4 with a passage that almost reads like stage directions from a play:
[Hightower and Byron] sit facing one another across the desk. The study is lighted now, by a greenshaded reading lamp sitting upon the desk. Hightower sits behind it, in an ancient swivel chair, Byron in a straight chair opposite. Both their faces are just without the direct downward pool of light from the shaded lamp. Through the open window the sound of singing from the distant church comes. Byron talks in a flat, level voice.
Faulkner's details in this passage are almost overly precise. It sounds as though he is describing the props that need to be sourced for the scene and the blocking for actors. Why does it matter how much light is on each man's face, especially when they are characters in a novel? Novels can use visual imagery, but they are not a visual medium in the way plays or films are. Faulkner is playing here with the boundaries and limitations of the novel. Like other modernist writers and artists, he is interested in how he can stretch and bend his medium to more effectively represent his ideas. In this scene, Faulkner uses his words to paint a frozen tableau of two men who are talking to one another but who still can't quite see one another's faces. The precise and almost clunky visual details require the reader to pause for a moment to examine the characters' relationship.
Related Themes:
