"Irreconcilable antagonisms" in Faulkner and Conrad: The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' and As I Lay Dying

Faulkner and Conrad possessed marked affinities in personal history, moral vision and narrative technique. They wrote in response to "irreconcilable antagonism"; their common preoccupations and attitudes are grounded in temperamental affinities which were rooted in their own personal, familial and cultural histories. There are clear similarities between Conrad's Ukraine and Faulkner's South. The work of Mikhail Bakhtin supplies the 'key' or 'enabling methodology' for a comparative study of The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' and As I Lay Dying. The thesis is divided into two parts, which are, themselves, divided into titled sections. There are three introductory sections which aim to provide a critical 'map' for the reader. We then look at the ways in which Conrad and Faulkner represent and give voice to simple. This is followed by an examination of the relationship between figural and narratorial voices in The Nigger and the ways in which Faulkner uses the limited voices of individual characters to perform functions traditionally associated with the omniscient narrator. The issue of narratorial 'unreliability' and 'inconsistency' in both books is also explored. In the second part, we consider the pervasive relationship or 'congruence' between narrative and value-structures, a feature which the novels share. Our sense of this relationship grows directly out of the notion that they are composed of competing figural and narratorial voices. We look also at some of the major differences and similarities between the novels' value-schemes. We go on to examine how language is seen to relate to values. We then consider some of the implications or consequences of this relationship for notions of community and human solidarity. We conclude with an examination of the attitude of the authors, themselves, to their own work, especially in terms of their 'public' and 'private' voices.