The m/other to Quintine Campson

William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) has long been appreciated as one of the forerunners in the reign of stream of consciousness. In a view, the work accommodates some exact details of the exact dates the story takes place in them. In April 28, the weather was cloudy and a little rainy, there were some fluctuations in the cotton market, and the Yankees won a sweet game. What’s more, the rough sketch of the historical exactness delves into something more. People’s disillusionment with the-after-war situations, obsessions with materialism and commercialism, and many other background situations in the work are presented in the III chapter, championing Jason. However, the time also was the time of nascent psychology according to DR. Freud.Therefore, one other aspect of the work carried according to its time can be considered reading the story through the psychoanalysis lens. To enact that, the target case of this study is Quintine Campson, the narrator of its second chapter. Different reasons have so far been considered as the underlying core of his suicide form different possible angels, nonetheless Freudian point of view requires a new touch. In this respect the second chapter has been reviewed under the symbolic definitions of Freud to assay the precept of mother as the core issue of Quintine’s conflict. The studies so far have indicated him as an obsessive character exposed to the death drive from the beginning of the chapter; however, the present study tends to challenge the possibility of his obsession not with death but with the feminine drive. The indicators selected form the text correspond with those defined and well established in psychology according to Freud, while their interpretations reflect in some cases those of Judith Butler. Respectively the issue of suicide is considered not as an exclusive act of deleting a person from the environment, but as an inclusive act of adjoining what he searched truly. Even though the theme of search in 1920s is associated with that of sterility, and is prevalently present in the work, this obsessive search claims to differ. In other words, Quintine does not commit suicide; he tries to undone his primal loss of the mother and all the other feminine touches in his life. The discussion finds Quintine culpable of losing his identity and in a constant need for undoing the loss to the extent that unable to find the lost ones, he joins them.

کلیدواژه ها:

feminity ، symbolism ، identity ، suicide ، loss