Subjectivity Construction and Representation in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury

The process of identity construction has been of high interest to modern critical approaches in the human sciences in general and sociological and psychoanalytical approach in particular. The present paper seeks to explore the subjectivity formation and identity construction process in the characters of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury in terms of Lacanian structuralist paradigm. Versatile theoretical standpoints concerning the definition and mechanism of the unconscious have caused different readings of the subject. The theoretical framework of the present study focuses on the critical concepts of psychoanalysis including the unconscious and identity formation in both Freud and Lacan. Also, the Lacanian concept of subjecthood in the social milieu of the subject constitutes another theoretical framework of the present paper. The study demonstrates how the parents’ behavior and attitudes towards the children in Compson family shapes the latter’s subjectivity and their ultimate state of Identity. The employment of the psychoanalytical concepts of the repressed desire, the structure of the unconscious, linguistic alienation, the name of the father and the signifiers of the lingual system fully indicates the central role and inevitable impact of both the Symbolic and the social milieu in the emergence of subjectivity. The subjectivity construction of the major characters in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is processed in and by the socio-cultural context in which they were brought up, and is represented in their unconscious desires and tangible manners.