Blurred Action, Blurred Narration: Three Scenes Of Hurry From William Faulkner

In one of his most often quoted interviews, William Faulkner said, “Life is motion and motion is concerned with what makes man move—which is ambition, power, pleasure” qtd. in Cowley 138 . We may take this to mean that for Faulkner lack of motion had a purely negative connotation. His texts do not, however, present such a simple, straightforward picture. In certain action scenes where his characters are in a hurry, and thus in motion, life nevertheless comes to a standstill. Although they possess the “ambition” or “power” necessary for motion, these characters are often partially or temporarily immobile. Moreover, in such “scenes of hurry,” as I propose to label them, the characters’ ties with their reality are also severed. The action of the characters appears to be blurred, and the setting and atmosphere of these scenes of “hurry” dissolve into almost surreal nightmarish environments. The narrators of such scenes, in spite of their ostensible efforts to be clear, on the contrary grow obscure in their narration. I discuss in this article three scenes of hurry, from Light in August 1932 , The Sound and the Fury 1929 , and Absalom, Absalom! 1936 , in order to examine respectively instances of lack of motion, shift from a realistic to a surreal setting, and obscurity of narration in Faulkner’s fiction. I argue that such “blurred” narration produces unreliable narrators, a major aspect of Faulknerian fiction.