"If I had been there I could not have seen it this plain" : Minnesforskning och William Faulkners Absalom, Absalom! 

Sammanfattning:

In this essay I employ memory theories to examine Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. How are the memories depicted and how do they function in the novel? What are the characters 'allowed' to remember? Scholars that have written about William Faulkners usage of memories and narrative time in his novels, often claim that they together represent and create a sense of determinism and/or fatalism. Even though I agreed with that opinion, regarding time and memory in a lot of Faulkners novels, I wondered if these features in the text might not represent/mean something more, beyond that. One scholar have expressed the view that William Faulkners characters resemble blind marionettes of Destiny. I instead claim that the characters themselves, via their individual memories and temporal relations, create an internal determinism, connected with cultural memory, norms and traditions. I try to examine both the individual memories, as depicted in the novel, and the novel in its entirety, using different memory theories and narratology.