포크너 초기작품의 전쟁서사

War Narrative in Faulkner's Early Work

Beginning with Flags in the Dust (1929, 1973) William Faulkner presents the legendary stories of the Sartoris family and his romantic war narrative. The novel, centering around the memories of the Civil War and World War Ⅰ, shows the fatal clash between the old and the new generation in their historical consciousness and self-definition. The war narratives of both generations here are represented through the mirror of the Civil War, for southerners, the American War has always been in their mind. Although Faulkner never fought in any of the Wars, he in his early work re-envisions the traditional war narrative of the South which romanticizes and mythologizes chivalry, reckless heroism gallantry, and honor code. Also, the novel to a great extent focuses on the war trauma of young Bayard Sartoris returning from World War Ⅰ. His traumatic war narrative, replaying the haunting memory of his twin brother John's death, reveals self-destructive and irreconcilable chasms within himself. It further accentuates his alienation from his own family and his community in the process of modernization of the South. The major concerns of Faulkner's war narrative do not lie in its historical truth or physical fights of combat strategies, but rather in how each war affects Southerners, their Southern identity and their self-preservation. In his war narrative, Faulkner emphasizes not just man's relation(/conflict) with past but the presentness of the past that is crucial to the twentieth-century Southern identity. Moreover Faulkner's representation of war in his early work clearly reveals his creative reconstruction and retelling of myths/folklores surrounding the Civil War and World War Ⅰ. The war narrative here, however, is neither politically motivated nor morally introspective. Although Faulkner is celebrating with pride the chivalric culture of the South, he also criticizes and parodies Southerners' romance and mythmaking of the old values and "the lost cause" which still had been rampant in the cultural scene even in the early twentieth-century.