Acolyte Of Nature: Spirituality In Faulkner’s Wilderness

The following thesis examines William Faulkner’s novels Go Down, Moses, As I Lay Dying, and The Sound and the Fury using the Book of Genesis as a thematic frame to explore the ways in which environmentalism and spirituality blend to form an ecological ethic that places the environment as a subject of religious worship. This worship of the environment appears most present in the chapters “The Old People” and “The Bear” of Go Down, Moses, in which the wilderness is portrayed as a type of Eden. Similarly, the Compson estate in The Sound and the Fury is for the Compson children a type of Eden. Both of these novels depict not only an Edenic existence, but also the Fall and exile from Eden as a result of the natural land’s destruction at the hands of commercialization and industrialization. The novel whose narrative chronologically follows this exile, As I Lay Dying, then depicts the result of the Fall, as the Bundren family must resort to working in factories and abandon the natural land that once supported them.