William Faulkner: From Jefferson to the World by Hyatt H. Waggoner

Author:Hyatt H. Waggoner [Waggoner, Hyatt H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary Figures, Literary Criticism, American, General, History, United States, State & Local
ISBN: 9780813182223
Google: CAUaEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: UP of Kentucky
Published: 2021-09-15T23:26:07.900987+00:00

Both men, like Jason before them, come to feel that time is the key to success in their fight with circumstance. The convict battles the waters with almost incredible endurance and courage to get where there are people before the baby is born; Wilbourne races against the time when their money will be gone, the time when it will be too late to do an abortion, the time when Charlotte will be dead. For the convict: “Time: that was his itch now, so his only chance was to stay ahead of it as long as he could and hope to reach something before it struck.” For Wilbourne, remembering Charlotte after her death: “the body, the broad thighs and the hands that liked bitching and making things. It seemed so little, so little to want, to ask. With all the old graveward-creeping, the old wrinkled withered defeat. . .”

Finally, it is not insignificant, trivial, as it has been suggested, that both plots end with the man in the state prison. Both men choose to go to prison, the convict when he was already free and would never have been searched for, having been listed as dead in the flood; the doctor after the means of suicide has been offered him. The one chooses prison to be free of entanglements, the other to keep love alive a little while longer by remembering. The convict expresses his reason for preferring prison to life outside in the final words of his story: “‘Women—!’ the tall convict said.” Wilbourne wonders about the possibility of survival after death but decides that it would, if it existed, not provide for survival of the kind of love to which he and Charlotte have dedicated themselves:

Because if memory exists outside of the flesh it wont be memory because it wont know what it remembers so when she became not then half of memory became not and if I become not then all of remembering will cease to be.—Yes, he thought, between grief and nothing I will take grief.

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