Structure of modernist narrative discourse in a changing world in "The Sound and the Fury" and "The Grapes of Wrath"

Narrative fiction displays a significant and various innovation in form and content to depict experiences of living in a disrupted world. Exploring the narrative techniques utilized by modernist narrative fiction requires an understanding of the structure of these narratives through the investigation of the categories of narratology. The focus of this study is on the effect of major political, social, and economic changes in the temporal, spatial and organizational structure of modernist narratives. Two novels are analyzed; Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1984 [1929]), and Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1992 [1939]). Each of these novels follows a major turning point in history that is reflected in the life of people and their search for their own identity in a new confused world. Modernist novels capture this changing world through innovative means of presenting narrative discourse. This study offers an interdisciplinary approach to the interpretation of modernist fictional narrative that is expected to provide a new perspective for literary critics, historians, and narrative theorists. Classical narratology such as Genette's typologies has provided the toolkit for the interpretation of narrative structure. However, this study is based on postclassical narratology, which applies interdisciplinary approaches to the analysis of fictional narratives utilizing in this interpretation the tools and techniques provided by classical narratology. The aim of this thesis is to explore the utilization of particular narrative techniques to capture the political, social, and economic history of that period. This investigation includes modernists' fictional narrative discourse, which portrays specific mental and physical events that contribute to construing the world and interpreting its history. The narrative analysis examines the techniques through which spatial and temporal features intermingle in the organizational structure of the discourse narrative of these novels. I examined the theoretical assumptions and concepts of narratology and narrative structure, pointing, in particular, to the narratological categories of time, space, narration, and voice, which facilitate the interpretation of the two modernist novels under investigation along with the contextual analysis of cultural memory and the reconstruction of identity. The analysis of the discoursive narrative structure of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath demonstrates how attempts are made to experiment with new and untraditional narrative techniques and styles. It reveals how the writers manipulate narratological tools to express directly or indirectly the circumstances experienced by people in these novels. Space in these regional narratives is thematized. Stretches of spatial presentations develop a thematic content that forms the body of narrative upon which the whole story is built. The new styles of writing created by Faulkner and Steinbeck expose how the perception of major historical changes and events can be viewed from different angles, which produce multiple interpretation and reflect various worldviews. Faulkner and Steinbeck represent these different perceptions of events through the manipulation and employment of certain narratological tools that enables them to create multiple worlds in the same narrative discourse with plethora of voices, expressing different interpretations and worldviews. This is facilitated by the adoption of the stream-of-consciousness technique, which presents stretches of ideas and thoughts reflecting on the cultural and social changes and manifested in spatial and temporal narrative structure. The structure of both novels relies much on allegories and myths that are fused in the narratives symbolizing various conditions and events.