Emma (Creative Interpretation of Faulkner’s style)

It’s almost the end of summer. Daddy says it’s the year of our Lord, 1934. I say it’s the year of dust kicked in the Mississippi River, turning things as brown as our daily oatmeal. He says to be thankful. People got it harder than us. We have shoes and we have oatmeal. But we have it worst here, in the town we call home. I know it because we aren’t alone, and I see with these eyes what I have not.

There’s a brick house down the road. There’s a brick layered upon brick layered upon brick that forms a perfect rectangle, one covered in a shining aluminum roof with just one dirty spot near the chimney, a brick chimney that juts out the shining metal clumsily surrounded by grout and cement to keep the roof from leaks. The brick house contains a boy with black underneath fingernails and shoes shinier than mine but without buckles, because buckles are for little girls and I grew out of my little girl phase years ago but the buckles came with me because good trailer girls get new shoes when Daddy finds job at the county store. And he hasn’t yet. So I get a dinged tin trailer, wooden door missing two hinges and a couple of sheets to cover Mommy and Daddy’s bedroom. I get buckles and he gets blue laces on his shoes. I see my face in them when I smile, and when I smile all I see is my face.

I don’t bear looking at brick house boy. He could have three heads and scream and I couldn’t look him in that face. It’s a good face. I see it when he looks away to call to his Mama that he’ll be home for supper, when he looks at the milkman and his horse pulling that sad cart with the broken axel, when he laughs so hard his face points to the sky and that laughter flies to the sun and back down again.

I see the pieces of his face and piece them together to make a boy who belongs in a brick house nicer than my own, a brick house with a door that hangs straight and a porch that’s square and clean and attached to the home like a normal house would. He has a yard and a wooden fence with three rows his Pappy built in the dead of summer. They were meant to keep the dog in. But the dog got killed by a bear, a big paw swinging in the dead of night trying for the apple trees and instead clawing its enemy in the throat, a dying dog’s sound ripped to shreds and the screaming woofing howling whimpering turning into silence, broken only by a boy in a brick house screaming and howling too. The bear was gone by the time the boy found his pup but the bear wasn’t far enough to hide from Pappy’s musket.

The boy in the brick house ate well that night. I wondered what bear meat tasted like from my seat at the table where we all smelled it. The meat was smoked and it wafted to our trailer through the tin and the sheet over the hole in the side. We stared at our daily oatmeal and I know we wanted something better. Lust and insatiable curiosity filled whatever silence wasn’t interrupted by tummies grumbling, fierce and low and the sound of skinning knife whittling down its purpose, singing soft and high.

The bear skin hung somewhere in the brick house. The head was nailed on a round wooden plate. I’ll see where they were situated in that house someday, I whisper to myself at night. I lay between my siblings and imagine the brick house boy with a knife in his hand and bear blood in his teeth. I’ll see that brick house inside, too.

~*~

My intention with this blog post was to interpret Faulkner’s writing style, the way he characterizes people, and the intention he has in using certain narratives. When Faulkner writes Vardaman on page 65, he intends to write from a child’s perspective. Run-on sentences, quotes that fall in the middle of paragraphs, odd observations and tactile details are littered throughout the chapter because children use all of these to express themselves.

Vardaman insists “it was not her”, referencing his dead mother. He observes how she looks different, which he can’t quite put his finger on, and he knows that the dead body in front of him isn’t “his mother” because death changes how a person looks to the living (66).

By repeating himself in the narrative, Faulkner is using a child’s nervous mind to show what it’s like to enter it. He uses repetitive dialogue like “it was not her” and talking about Cash’s “shadow” to show Vardaman’s state. In too much shock to string together much of a coherent narration, Vardaman’s thoughts are scattered, repetitive and often wandering. He goes from talking about his mother being “nailed up” in the coffin to her not being a rabbit. These things aren’t connected, but in a time of crisis, things string together and don’t always feel coherent to an adult (66).

In my writing, I tried to emulate this thinking with the repetition of the theme of bricks, shoes, bear, and meat. I wanted to hammer home what it was like to be in the mind of a young girl, poor, hungry and lonely, and get a snippet of her thoughts. There are run-on sentences, lots of details and not a real “point” to the chapter other than to show the characters and how they interact.