Growing Up Faulkner: Coming of Age, Identity, and Parental Responsibility in Three Faulkner Families.

• Main Author: Hoover, Heather Marie
• Format: Others
• Published: Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University 2004
• Subjects: children; Bundren; Sutpen; Compson; Faulkner; Arts and Humanities; English Language and Literature
• Online Access: https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/864; https://dc.etsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2021&context=etd

Throughout William Faulkner's fiction, specifically in Absalom, Absalom!, The Sound and the Fury, and As I Lay Dying, the impact of parents who intimately know failure and loss figure largely in the strange coming of age of their children. In the Compson family, the Sutpen family and the Bundren family, the influence of the parents' action or paralysis confuses the identities and roles of their children. The children often look to themselves or to one another in absence of healthy parental models, but they are not equipped to deal with their own or one another's emotional tumult. This inability to cope creates a tension that manifests itself in these children's behavior, their understanding of themselves, and their understanding of the world around them. Their experiences, the foundations of these experiences, and the outcomes set in motion a pattern for these children that is grounded in the failure of their parents.