A compare and contrast analysis of “Sound and The Fury” by William Faulkner and “A Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man” by James Joyce.
This paper discusses how both James Joyce and William Faulkner achieved considerable success with the manipulation and disorder of time in their narratives “Sound and The Fury” and “A Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man”. They both show plentiful use of the past to reveal the lack of purpose and barrenness of the present, as well as the futility of placing faith in the future. It shows how in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, past, present and future are represented as occurring simultaneously upon a single plane, yet the concept of time differs in each narrative perspective. In A Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man by James Joyce, young Stephen’s consciousness is splintered and chaotic, returning to random memories of home, family, and assorted past injustices. Both authors skillfully employ literary pandemonium to emphasize the direct reverse of the notion of time as an ordered element; demonstrating that time, as an entity, is restrictive and uninspired.
“One technique that is clearly used in the first few pages of Joyce’s ‘Portrait’ is the stream of consciousness device. According to Humphrey (1954), this is common postmodern literary technique in which a character’s thoughts are reproduced as they presumably occur; not in full sentences or in any logical sequence, but according to “an associative process that depends on the conscious or unconscious connections made by each individual’s mind (Humphrey, 1954). In Portrait’, young Stephen describes his world in a seemingly random, disjointed prose that is actually logical and coherent once the reader recognizes that it focuses, in part, on the child’s five senses and what they tell him.”