Allegory As Rhetoric: Faulkner's Trilogy - A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of California State University, San Bernardino, December 1997

1997 first edition California State University (San Bernardino, California), 8 3/4 x 11 1/4 inches tall x 1 1/4 inches thick blue buckram hardbound, no dust jacket (as issued), gilt lettering to front cover and spine, typescript printed on one side of page only, vi, 189 ff. Very slight rubbing and edgewear to covers. Otherwise, a very good copy - clean, bright and unmarked. Note that this is a heavy and oversized book, so additional postage will be required for international or priority orders. ~DDD~ In Allegory As Rhetoric, Sally Louise Schroeder examines the 'Snopes trilogy,' a series of three acclaimed novels written by William Faulkner (1897 - 1962) regarding the Snopes family in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. Consisting of The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion, the trilogy was begun in 1940 and completed in 1959. Functioning as narrator - the readers' surrogate and touchstone - V.K. Ratliff reveals to them the effects of Faulkner's militant rhetoric, rhetoric which is devised to deliberately manipulate their thoughts and those of Ratliff and other characters in the trilogy. Exploiting such rhetorical and stylistic devices as designed instability, misdirection, implicature and ellipses, Faulkner's manipulative style forces his readers to both experience the effects of Ratliff's contradictory behavior and respond to Faulkner's texts by speaking with them. What is unique about Faulkner's rehetorical use of allegory is that the allegory he chooses - one which is both familiar but whose message only seems obvious - causes uncritical readers to overlook it as either a rhetorical argument or an analytical tool. In his trilogy, Faulkner reveals in V.K. Ratliff the struggle of one man - and, by implication, the struggles of everyone - who ultimately resists the fraudulent temptations which money and power seem to offer. It is by experiencing vicariously the consequences of Ratliff's own struggle with his standard of values as he vacillates between what he knows inherently to be right or what he knows to be fraudulent that causes readers to both perceive the consequences of fraud's perverse effects upon others and to understand that Faulkner's trilogy is a parable which argues militantly that each reader must find his/her own truth in the allegory's apparent message - do what you know is 'right.…