The Fury Race

A century of race relations its historical constructs were recollected in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. He bravely salted the wound of race and racial distinctions by creating a self-consciously ambitious novel that is so structurally complex, you are left wondering what you have really just read. The truth is this: it is not the use or depiction of race that should be argued, but how the novel spites it, generalizes the opinions of the south as a whole and exploits the taboo behind colored people to prove that race is something invented by society, a social construct, and not some immortal organization. Race reveals itself in this novel through the racist characters Faulkner birthed, the exceptionally vivid prose and the unapologetic

June Second, 1910, for instance, begins with Quentin Thompson in his dorm room, narrating in his own mind. The distinction happens on page 86, beginning with “you’ve got to remember to think of them as colored people not niggers,” and ends with “the best way to take all people […] is […] for what they think they are, then leave them alone” (Faulkner 86). This begins the assumption of race in Quentin’s eyes, but also a depiction of what Faulkner really thinks. Faulkner moves to say that the construct of race and ‘niggers’ is nothing more than a mindset. He takes ‘nigger’,’ and exploits the word’s taboo by separating it from ‘negroes’ or ‘blacks,’ as it was very commonly thought of before; this deflates the complexity and meaning of race by making it unreal. Faulkner classified blacks as “colored people not niggers” which denotes the meaning behind the word. However derogatory, if one hears the word ‘nigger’ they think of a person, whereas if one hears ‘colored’ they think of an act and not a person. Faulkner has now made race inherent and not

He moves on to make this point and spite race by his saying that “a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior,” this is a bold misuse of the word and demolishes the taboo it held for many years (Faulkner 86). That statement is an astute comment that sums up how society viewed race at the time, and is a predominately white observation of race. Though racial distinctions are the backbone of race in this novel, and to leave out the most awful southernisms, would falsify Faulkner’s attempt to make racial a social construct. Faulkner first takes the human out of race, which then dehumanizes blacks takes away their most basic, yet derogatory distinction to prove that race is not real. Faulkner moves to say that anyone can assume the role of a ‘nigger’ and embody a certain behavior to become one. So not only is a ‘nigger’ a form of behavior, according to Quentin, it is “a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among” (Faulkner 86). This was a direct reflection of how whites viewed blacks at the time, and Faulkner used it to regress the blacks into a people that seek only to copy and obey the whites. At first, we may think Faulkner is moving to make blacks seem inferior, but he is instead making them inherent, and only a reflection. You cannot touch or grasp a reflection because it is not real, he makes race a