| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 外國語文學系 === 107 === In William Faulkner’s Light in August, the conscious struggles are results of characters’ mobility. Those conscious conflicts enable the characters to reshape customary knowledge through intuitive response. Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, explains the vitality resulting from human intuition. The capacity for intuition releases people from the constraint of measured time; therefore, the realm of timelessness could be experienced as a conscious duration. Actions originating from this apparently disordered time-space are regarded as the acting of free will. In Bergson’s interpretation, the disordered time represents the unconstraint of time in consciousness. The consequence from action provokes our perceptions. This conflict guarantees the sustained uncertainty in consciousness. In Bergson’s interpretation of free will, Joe Christmas’s death is regarded as an act of free will since his decision contains uncertainty which is not resolved until the end. However, critics following Jean Paul Sartre’s interpretation of Joe Christmas tend to label this character as the prisoner obsessed with the past. The truth is that his obsession should not be narrowly asserted as the “fetters” of the past. Instead, Faulkner magnifies the anxiety of time, which unsettles characters, and regards it as the value of human endurance. Faulkner’s core value of human endurance and Bergson’s approach to free will happen to align in terms of time’s variation. In fact, Christmas’s entanglement of the past is merely one of dimensions in Faulkner’s time spectrum. Taking Bergsonian free will as the departure, our understanding about characters’ perplexing performances advance to a more comprehensive level. Therein, the anxiety from disordered time becomes crucial to achieve their free will. More significantly, Christmas’s “personified time” problematizes Bergson’s approach to free will. In the liberation of time, free will is possible; the failure is equally potential. Faulkner’s characters more comprehensively accept both possibilities.
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