Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Faulkner, William (Vol. 11) - Kenneth G. Johnston

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KENNETH G. JOHNSTON

The sound of ticking clocks and watches often provides the accompaniment for William Faulkner's tales of decline and change in the South. A clock strikes the quarter hours in the afternoon quiet of the Sartoris mansion; Miss Emily's "invisible watch" marks the passage of time within the shadowed rooms of the decaying Grierson house; and Quentin Compson's timepiece, once his grandfather's, its hands twisted off, ticks on, adding to the sound and the fury of his final day. The sound is appropriate because, as Robert Penn Warren has observed, "the anguish of time, the tension of change," is Faulkner's basic theme. But in Faulkner's short story "Barn Burning," there is a silent clock. In the wagon of Abner Snopes, "among the sorry residue of the dozen and more movings," there is a clock, "which would not run, stopped at some fourteen minutes past two o'clock of a dead and forgotten day and time." (p. 434)

"Barn Burning" is a chapter in the...

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1. Introduction
2. Warren Beck
3. Kenneth G. Johnston
4. Brent Harold
5. Robert Martin Adams
6. Richard Gray
7. Copyright