Resumen de Faulkner's South: Is There Truth in Fiction?

Louis A. Ferleger, Richard H. Steckel

• William Faulkner's rich descriptions of race relations, merchant-landlord interactions, and the Civil War display a keen sensitivity to historical nuance and detail that remains forceful. For many, Faulkner's South is the South they know and love. The greatness of Faulkner's novels hardly depends upon their description of the health conditions of Southerners, but throughout his work, he does painstakingly create images of their physical traits, eating habits, and stature. Faulkner was unrelenting in his negative images of Southern physical attributes. Faulkner drank heavily himself and may well have projected his own habits onto others. And Faulkner's physically pathetic characters, with their yearning for better health, belie the reality that health and nutrition in the South was as good or better than the national average. Thus his novels, which are widely taken to capture the psychocultural "truth" of the region, present a skewed picture of its material reality.