Argument: The theme of the story is derived from the characters' setting and other factors, not the characters themselves.
Claim: "Christmas's response to Freedman Town is not the only time heresponds to African Americans in this way. It actually echoes several otheroccasions on which he responds to African Americans, not as a mass, butas individuals whose individuality and language he fails to understand."
Evidence: "Focusing on the unstable margins of Jefferson,and presenting the role of African Americans as an unbridgeable gap atthe heart of the text."
"Faulkner provides in Light in August an even moreeloquent expression of the southern need for social change."
Argument: Matthew Wynn Sivils argues that William Faulkner, in his novel "Sound and the Fury", uses ecological disturbances in his books from real life events.
Claim: "The convict was bearing again that sound which he had heard twice before and would never forget-that sound of deliberate and irresistible and monstrously disturbed water." Sivils uses this quote from one of Faulkner's books, "If I Forget Thee, Jersualem", to mimic the forthcoming of a tsunami.
Evidence:
"The flourishing of Faulkner's literary career coincided with perhaps the worst period of environmental abuse the South has ever known, and it is unsurprising that he incorporates such desolation into his writing."
"Faulkner's literary symbiosis between African Americans and the land
helps reveal his environmental consciousness-his view of the South as
a place of complicated racial and natural conflict."
"Anyone who understands the effect of seasonal changes on the land
and the relationships between animals, or knows the best place to hunt
or fish is thinking not only environmentally but ecologically. This way
of knowing the natural world is based upon an understanding of
community, and few writers understood community, human or
non human, as well as Faulkner"
Argument: Olga Kuminova, in her article "Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury as a Struggle for Ideal Communication" argues that the incommunicable nature of the characters in the novel marks the distinguishing tone that William Faulkner uses to "lend the novel full and appreciative attention". Claim: Benjy relates every single experience by sound or glimpse, thus maintaining the incommunicable nature of the plot. Evidence: Frank Swinnerton, review, Evening News 15 May 1931, 8, in Bassett 92