『兵士の報酬』 : 大戦後の「牧神」たちの悲劇的狂想曲(英語英文学専攻)

概要

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Soldiers' Pay, William Faulkner's first novel, was published in 1926. It is one of the so-called "Lost Generation"novels. It's also an antiwar novel as not a few ones were so in those years. Faulkner wrote aesthetic poems when he started his literary career, and they gave influence upon Soldiers' Pay which was the story of a young flier heavily injured in the airfight in the European battlefield of World War I. The aim of this novel is to write on how the return of the soldier Donald Mahon to his hometown in the South influenced the whole situation of the town and its people. Donald has lost his memory of the past and is just like a living doll. His destroyed face causes much embarrassment among the people around him including his fiancee. The story goes on centering on such embarrassment as well as the humanistic support given to Donald by Joe Gilligan and Margaret Powers who experienced the tragic war and its time and know the importance of humanity so well. This paper tries to make clear how young Faulkner wrote this novel and how it plays its role in his literary world as one of the typical works produced in the postwar era 1920s. Soldiers' Pay is Faulkner himself in his very early career and it also suggests in advance much of what he is to show in his later "Yoknapatawpha Saga."