Faulkner comes closer perhaps to Eugene Neill than to his own tradition.įour men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions-as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer-and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. The lawyer for the defense is the avenging god in what is - in essence - a Greek tragedy. She must live on to make her servant's hanging worth the sacrifice. The Negro woman who is convicted of the murder of a baby is proved guilty only of the fact not the spirit, but her mintrens has not even the escape of open confession. In Faulkner's and clipped and broken dialogue, one learns the tragedy of a lost woman, who has her heritage side, but is caught, unwillingly, in assurance of a future of subjugation to her own bitter memories, her awareness of guilt, her abasement to the man who is her husband, but who cannot really forgive. The rest of the text is the bare bones of which melodrama might have been made by a lesser writer. Here, on the one hand, he seems to have taken on the mantle of the ancient of, in long passages hymning the march of the frontier, the building that accented the passing years, the penorans of history in the making of which Jefferson, Mississippi, where his drama is enacted, is but a segment. A strange book even to come from the pen of the unpredictable Nobel prize winner.

Requiem for a Nun by William Faulkner