Reivers ve Yaramazlık Etiği: Faulkner’da Eşiksellik ve Ahlaki Oyun

Yıl 2025, Cilt: 6 Sayı: 2, 157 - 182, 01.01.2026

Ioana Constandache

https://doi.org/10.58306/wollt.1791880

Öz

Bu makale, William Faulkner’ın sonraki dönem eserlerini inceleyerek, yazarın sanatsal ve felsefi ifadesi olarak The Reivers’a odaklanmaktadır. Analiz, komik ile trajik, çocukluğun başlangıcı ile Güney dünyasının ahlaki karmaşıklığı arasındaki gerilime odaklanmakta ve Faulkner’ın varoluşsal deneyimi pikaresk yapı ve grotesk mizah aracılığıyla nasıl dile getirdiğini vurgulamaktadır. Lucius Priest, Boon Hogganbeck ve Ned McCaslin gibi karakterler aracılığıyla çalışma, yazarın çocukluğu, bireysel özgürlük, gelenek ve etik kodların sürekli çatıştığı bir ahlaki olgunlaşma ve toplumsal anlayış döngüsüne nasıl dönüştürdüğünü incelemektedir.
Makale ayrıca, yazarın toplumsal geri çekilmesi, geçmişe takıntısı ve son eserinin vasiyet işleviyle vurgulanan zamansallık ve hafıza üzerine Faulknervari düşünceleri de incelemektedir. Miss Corrie tarafından temsil edilen yenileyici kadın rolü ve mit ile gerçeklik arasındaki gerilimi vurgulayan ortaçağ fabliau'suyla metinlerarasılık tartışılmaktadır. Anlatı yapısı, mizahi sapmalar ve kelime oyunları (‘‘at’’/ ‘‘fahişeler’’), çizgi romanın etik ve toplumsal düşünmenin bir aracı haline geldiği epistemolojik ve ahlaki araçlar olarak analiz edilmektedir.
Bu bakış açısıyla makale, The Reivers’ın Faulkner'ın nihai kaygılarını nasıl sentezlediğini ortaya koymayı amaçlamaktadır: ölümlülükle yüzleşmek, unutulmaya direnmek ve tutarlı ve karmaşık bir edebi evrende insan paradokslarını keşfetmek. Faulkner'ın geç dönem eserlerinin anlatısal yaratıcılığını, psikolojik derinliğini ve ahlaki inceliğini aynı anda vurgulayan ve Güney edebiyatı ve Amerikan modernist kanonu çalışmalarındaki önemini ortaya koyan bir okuma önerilmektedir.

The Reivers and the Ethics of Mischief: Liminality and Moral Play in Faulkner

Öz

This article explores the later works of William Faulkner, focusing on The Reivers as the author’s artistic and philosophical statement. The analysis focuses on the tension between the comic and the tragic, between the initiation of childhood and the moral complexity of the Southern world, highlighting how Faulkner articulates existential experience through picaresque structure and grotesque humour. Through characters such as Lucius Priest, Boon Hogganbeck, and Ned McCaslin, the study investigates how the author transfigures childhood into a cycle of moral maturation and social understanding, in which individual freedom, tradition, and ethical codes continually conflict.
The article also examines Faulknerian reflections on temporality and memory, highlighted by the author’s social withdrawal, obsession with the past, and the testamentary function of his final work. The regenerative feminine role, represented by Miss Corrie, and the intertextuality with medieval fabliau, which emphasizes the tension between myth and reality, are discussed. The narrative structure, humorous digressions, and wordplay (“horse’’/ “whores”) are analysed as epistemological and moral tools, through which the comic becomes a medium for ethical and social reflection.
Through this perspective, the article intends to reveal how The Reivers synthesizes Faulkner’s final concerns: confronting mortality, resisting oblivion, and exploring human paradoxes in a coherent and complex literary universe. A reading is proposed that simultaneously highlights the narrative inventiveness, psychological depth, and moral refinement of Faulkner’s late work, revealing its relevance in the study of Southern literature and the American modernist canon.

Anahtar Kelimeler

Faulkner , The Reivers , morality , grotesque humor , initiation process

Kaynakça

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