On The Sound and The Fury: Time in the Work of Faulkner

Okay so towards the end of this packet I kind of got a little lost because Sartre started getting all philosophical and I just couldn't really follow along, but for the most part I thought that his evaluation of Faulkner's writing was pretty accurate and interesting. Evidently, the assessment and manipulation of time were the focal points. Sartre says "In order to arrive at real time, we must abandon this invented measure which is not a measure of anything," which, similar to the comedian the other day, is an valid thought because how can we assess the present, past, and future in an accurate way by using some circular device that ticks every second, however long that is. It's an arbitrary method used for control and understanding of a situation and tells us virtually nothing about when it is and why "when" it is is significant to us. I also liked his evaluation of how there is no future, how "beyond this present time there is nothing." It was a weird thought to wrap around that there is not future, and, for Faulkner's characters, they must approach the future backwards from previous events that spell out the future without ever reaching it. Sartre says that "Faulkner always showed events when they were already over," because he had his characters live in the past. What made them into who they are in his ever-rare "present time" was a compilation of the events they had in the past, so that was where he focused. Time separates different instances, it cannot be measured with numerical values, although that may allow for more control, we must sacrifice this power if we ever hope to understand the broader meanings of past, present, and future.