“Noah's sons had inherited the flood although they had not been there to see the flood” (Go Down, Moses 276). This sense of doom follows five major novels written by William Faulkner set in his mythical county of Yoknapatawpha. Ruin befalls the land because of the fatalistic attitude of the people who live there, fatalistic because they realize that the things that will happen are inevitable. In his article “Fate,” Richard Taylor, a noted fatalist, states “No power in heaven or earth can make false a statement that is true” (107). Furthermore, no matter what the descendants of the doomed South might do, there was no chance of altering their destiny, no matter how hard they fought against it. Through the fallen and decadent society of the old South with its fall into the Civil War, a fate that generations of descendants would suffer eventually settled upon the country. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Looking at the catastrophe in the post-war South, it should be noted that, according to fatalists, God's laws cannot be changed without consequences. Anyone who attempted to alter the predestined outcome of their life was cursed, while those who accepted it, although condemned, found the freedom to live their lives to the fullest extent and with the least amount of suffering. Fatalists who do not accept their assigned purpose will be consumed by their own fear. An example of someone who accepted fate was Candace in The Sound and the Fury. She was "doomed and she knew it, she accepted the condemnation without seeking it or fleeing from it" (412). Of all the Compsons, perhaps she was the only one whose life ended in comfort. Although the curse of the South has doomed the family, “one of them is crazy [Jason] and another has drowned himself [Quentin, after the family sold the last piece of land of their inheritance to send him to Harvard] and l 'other was kicked out on the street by her husband [Candace], what's the reason they're not crazy too […] they don't let her daughter's name be said on the spot until after a while dad doesn't even come anymore in town but sat there all day with the jug” (290). Fate continued from the first Compson, Quentin Maclachan Compson, to Jason Compson, the last of the family who remained a childless bachelor because he was condemned to watch his family wither and die, thus making him bitter towards the world he lived in. lived. The Compson dynasty ended with him because he failed to uphold the qualities of his ancestors “who had something in them of decency and pride even after they had begun to fail in integrity and the pride had become chiefly vanity and self-pity.” "(415). The unfortunate legacy of his ancestors continued through the family tree. Fate was ultimately brought about by a Compson governor, Quentin MacLachan, and a Compson general, Jason Lycurgus Compson II, both of whom not only they fought and lost the civil war, but they also gave their lives Next was an alcoholic man married to a hypochondriac woman, who gave birth to the children who put an end to the Compson name: the handicapped. mental Benji, who was not only locked up in an asylum but was also castrated; Quentin, who killed himself; Candace, who ran away never to return after dumping another doomed child on her parents; 'last because he had accepted his family's ruin with a hard heart and had given up on them and himself long ago, wanting to end the curse with him once and for all Jason's end, fighting against the ruin and trying to put end to all this, is incontrast with that of Candace, who accepted her fate and moved on. Jason lives his life in a “bleak cave […] a railed enclosure cluttered with shelves and boxes […] and stinking with a mixed smell of cheese and kerosene and harness oil and the huge iron stove against which he was tobacco has been chewed and spat out for nearly a hundred years” (414-15). While Candace, although still doomed, ends her life in the lap of extravagance. She is found by a local librarian in a “picture full of luxury, money and sunlight – a Cannebiere backdrop of mountains, palms, cypresses and sea […] the hatless woman's face between a rich scarf and seal coat, without age and beautiful, cold, serene and damned” (415). Quentin also struggles with his father's cynicism, as seen through much of his internal dialogue with his father. What he ultimately wants is to prove his father wrong. Mr. Compson gives him a watch, telling him, “Not that you could remember the time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not try to master it with all your breath” (93). Quentin must forget his concern about Caddy's growing sexuality. His father's advice that if you forget the time you would forget the problem would only make his frustration with Caddy meaningless; his antebellum view of honor that women, especially virgin virtues, must be protected. There must be meaning in his feelings, so he chooses to stop time forever since he cannot end it by defacing his watch, to ensure Caddy's virginity is never ruined. So he commits suicide. The ruin of the fathers does not end with him. Caddy not only gets married, but before doing so she also has a child. God's will cannot be ignored. From the ashes of these ruined lives arises the second point of fatalism according to which the name determines the destiny. Why does a character become fatalistic? “For there existed a number of true statements about the details of his life, both past and future, and he came to know what some of these statements were and to believe them, including those concerning the future” (Taylor 106). Like the name Compson who acquired the curse to "fail at all he touched except longevity or suicide" (The Sound and The Fury 408), the characters in Light in August also discovered that a name was a "wish of what he will do" (33). With Christmas, it was precisely the meaning of his name, containing the word Christ, that caused him to be lynched and killed out of hypocritical fury. Christmas, like Christ, also accepted his fate and knew he could not escape it. And although he knew he was being corrupted by Miss Burden, and this frightened him, "something held him back, as the fatalist can always be held back: by curiosity, by pessimism, by sheer inertia" (260). But what kept him from that woman who seemed to be made up of two people? The past had condemned him to his lot in life and had chained him to his future destiny. Christmas' grandfather's bigotry would forever change the life he would lead. His grandfather had tried to get rid of him only to curse him and force him to wander the land as a Dog, to inherit the black man's curse as well as the white man's. “The curse of the black race is the curse of God. But the curse of the white man is the black man who will forever be God's chosen because He once cursed him” (253). Thus, Christmas became his own curse, being of black and white blood. For it was the mixed blood fighting within him that led to his death at the hands of the white supremacist Grimm, the mixed blood that drove him from violence to inaction. In the end, Christmas challenged thehis black blood only to be captured by the white blood curse to be castrated like an animal and die a gruesome death. He too accepted this fate just as Christ accepted his. Only in the story of “The Bear” in Go Down is Moses fully explained why the South is doomed. “All the South is cursed, and all of us who are descended from it, who ever sucked, white and black, lie under the curse? Assuming that my people [the white man] brought the curse to the earth: perhaps for this reason only their descendants can – not resist it, not fight it – perhaps simply endure it and survive until the curse is removed” (266). But cursed by what? White men despised those who farmed and were closest to the land, black men and controlled them through slavery. This would be the “ravaged heritage” inherited by the children and grandchildren of the antebellum South (284). Yet, with this mistreatment, intermarriage flourished to the point that everyone lost their heritage and identity. Everyone also moved to the cities and got lost, losing contact with the land and destroying it. Only the condemned and the humble of heart will be able to survive (249). Absalom, Absalom! He further explains that the land was cursed by the Civil War, which was the result of the South's abuse of slavery. The land would betray and destroy the lineage of not only those who inherited that “fatal and doomed war […] when the South realized that it was now paying the price for having erected its economic edifice not on the rock of severe morality but on the quicksands of opportunism and moral banditry" (209), but all those who lived on the condemned land. All the gentlemen had turned women into ladies during the antebellum South, “then the war came and turned the women into ghosts” (7). Women also inherited the ruin, although they had not been there to witness the fall. This can be seen through the way Faulkner portrays the once authentic Southern women in his novels as mere shadows of their former glory. The mother, Caroline, in The Sound and the Fury becomes a hypochondriac and a constant torment to those around her. However, it is the curse of her children and husband that keeps her brooding in the dark confines of their once grand estate. Although she contributes to the downfall by forbidding Candace's name from being spoken in her home and ceremoniously burning her child support checks, allowing Jason to swindle nearly seven thousand dollars that would later be stolen from the rightful heir, she appears to be the one suffering from more. Burden, in Light in August, became a recluse in her mansion after Colonel Sartoris killed her grandfather and brother for fighting to establish the rights of the black man in the South. Therefore, her grandfather's conviction leads to her being treated like a foreigner. In "The Bear", Ike forces his wife to become barren when she chooses to reject her inheritance of the doomed land and gives the money to the black blood. in his family. Thus, to rectify the curse of his fathers by mixing with black blood and then repudiating them, he condemns his wife and his lineage forever. Rose in Absalom, Absalom! she is driven to spinsterhood by the ruin of the men around her and the misfortune of her family. With the death of her sister, married to the demon Sutpen, she takes care of her eldest niece, Judith, in hopes of saving her from Sutpen's fate. However, she is only sucked into the rushing torrent of her family's fate by moving in with Judith in the doomed house and agreeing to marriage to the fallen Sutpen, who wishes to marry her only if she bears a child. As an eternal spinster, she tries to throw theruins on Quentin, whose grandfather was Sutpen's only friend. Eventually going to the old house to take her nephew, Henry, to the hospital, her presence causes the house's caretaker, Clytie, to burn the house and Henry, leaving yet another horror piled at Rosa's feet. Furthermore, Addie in As I Lay Dying would rather spend her life making herself and everyone around her miserable instead of making life better for her and her family, all because of her husband's lack of love. She ultimately dies amid poverty, surrounded by a family she hated and drugged through floods and fires just to humiliate her family's selfish desires. Therefore, all men of the South must suffer through these atrocities and many others. On a smaller scale, in Absalom, Absalom! all Sutpen's lineage must suffer for his folly. He, like many Southern men, is courageous, but that “Southern life itself, future hopes and past pride, should have been thrown in the balance with such men to support it – men with valor and strength but without mercy or honor. Is it any wonder that Heaven deemed us fit to let us go?" (13). The great Southern lords also became the ghosts of the antebellum lords. The novel records Sutpen's life without mercy or honor as he repudiates the his first wife and son because of black blood, and yet he commits the same act again with his slave, giving birth to a daughter of mixed blood before marrying a white-stemmed woman to fulfill his dream of building a large plantation. However, Sutpen remains trapped in the trap of mixing his white blood with his black blood. It was not the mixing of blood that caused his condemnation, but the fact that he acted without honor in producing this “tainted” bloodline. .The fate follows Sutpen until his death and extends to everyone with whom he or his lineage associates. This includes Quentin Compson, who has no relation to the Sutpens, but is caught up in their curse because his grandfather has made them. friendship with Sutpen, thus accepting the fate of death. Quentin kills himself that same year for the end of his family, as illustrated above, but perhaps Sutpen's end involved him trying to end it all with death, as the rest of Quentin's family survived. Because of Sutpen's pride, his only heir and his salvation were trapped. the same sentence. Rosa saw him and knew that “those two condemned children were growing up and she could not save” (12). Since there was no way to save them, they needed protection from themselves. Rosa could only sit and watch as her sister Ellen married into destiny and then placed the curse on her children. Ellen was "projecting onto Judith [her daughter] all the abortive dreams and disappointments of her doomed and frustrated youth" (55.56). This was inevitable, of course. Everyone inherits the flood without even seeing the flood, a flood of destiny that is so extraordinarily powerful that it drags all those trapped within it along its treacherous path, but when someone realizes they are stuck in its currents, it's too late to save. anyone, let alone themselves. Case in point is Sutpen's son, Henry. Although Henry soon realizes his downfall, he can do nothing about it. He cannot mock God's will, not even by running away. Seeing himself caught in the current of the family curse, he first tries to repudiate his lineage and his name. Even though he is good friends with Bon, being his newly discovered half-brother, he unintentionally introduced him to his sister to push her further into destiny. The moment his father told him Bon's origins, he knew “that he was doomed anddestined to kill” (72). Henry had hoped to avoid this curse, by running away, by denying his name, even by going to war, yet fate does not change, blood is blood even if the name changes. Bon realized it too. If not even war could kill him to stop the catastrophe, he would have to let it take its course. He, unlike Henry, accepted his fate and even prepared well in advance: that he had to die to stop the curse. When she realized that Henry would not accept their fate, she encouraged him. “I'm the nigger who's going to sleep with your sister. Unless you stop me, Henry” (286). Bon even goes so far as to put photos of his octoroon and his bastard son in the locket given to him by Judith. Thus, he could stop fate with his death, without having anyone to cry for him, or feel sorry enough to care about anything of his own, including his bastard son. But fate continues with her son who is welcomed by Clytemnestra and Judith. Bon's death and sacrifice did no more to stop the raging force of his destiny than Henry running away from it helped him. Ultimately, God's will claims everything in the doomed house of Sutpen's pride when Clytemnestra sets it on fire thinking that the sheriff had finally come to get Henry for Bon's murder, killing herself and Henry. Only Bon's idiotic nephew survived to carry on Sutpen's legacy in a mental institution, just as Benji survived in an earlier novel. All of this could have been avoided if Sutpen had acted with honor and had the courage to admit his mistakes.mistakes, yet when he had the chance to warn his children of their mistakes by intending to marry Bon, he continued to "look at them for two weeks and did nothing […] and had also condemned all his blood, both black and white” (215-16). He couldn't act because he was afraid, afraid of altering the destiny mapped out for him since he was a child turned away from the door by a black servant. If he ever interfered to alter fate, he knew it would become a mockery, and the revenge he set out to enact would be thwarted. The fact that he “had entered in good faith, hiding nothing, while the other party or parties involved had hidden from him the very one factor that would destroy the entire plan and design for which [he] had worked” (220 ). In the twilight of their life he told all his plans to Rosa who only wanted a child from her to carry on his plan, but his first wife, Eulalia Bon, hid the fact that she had black blood from him until it was too late . It was cursed. Black blood is the bane of the South. No matter how hard they tried to subdue the black race, it always cropped up among them in mixed blood and corrupt heritage. Ultimately it became the ruin of Sutpen and the entire South, so Bon thought of reconciling with his father Sutpen, saying, "I would have done it, I would have gone first to him, who has the blood after it has been defiled and corrupted by any what was in Mother". "(263). If Sutpen had simply recognized himself as his father, the curse could have been broken, but Sutpen waited, driven by pride. Thus, Bon plotted revenge, for returning to Sutpen outweighed the fate that followed. Bon knew that Judith was his half-sister and the repercussions of marrying her, but he was only doing it to spite his father Having lost his son, Bon, to the black blood and Henry to Bon, Sutpen decides to have one last son after Rosa rejects him: by Milly Jones, the daughter of Wash Jones, a poor white man living in Sutpen's Hundred He should have carried on the name through his son, but when he had, 1996. 34-35.