The Reivers and the Ethics of Mischief: Liminality and Moral Play in Faulkner

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Dünya Dilleri, Edebiyatları ve Çeviri Çalışmaları Dergisi
Cilt: 6 Sayı: 2
The Reivers and the Ethics of Mischief: Liminality and Moral Play in Faulkner

The Reivers and the Ethics of Mischief: Liminality and Moral Play in Faulkner

Pages : 157-182

View : 19 | Download : 48

Publication Date : 2026-01-01

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :This article explores the later works of William Faulkner, focusing on The Reivers as the author’s artistic and philosophical statement. The analysis focuses on the tension between the comic and the tragic, between the initiation of childhood and the moral complexity of the Southern world, highlighting how Faulkner articulates existential experience through picaresque structure and grotesque humour. Through characters such as Lucius Priest, Boon Hogganbeck, and Ned McCaslin, the study investigates how the author transfigures childhood into a cycle of moral maturation and social understanding, in which individual freedom, tradition, and ethical codes continually conflict. The article also examines Faulknerian reflections on temporality and memory, highlighted by the author’s social withdrawal, obsession with the past, and the testamentary function of his final work. The regenerative feminine role, represented by Miss Corrie, and the intertextuality with medieval fabliau, which emphasizes the tension between myth and reality, are discussed. The narrative structure, humorous digressions, and wordplay (“horse’’/ “whores”) are analysed as epistemological and moral tools, through which the comic becomes a medium for ethical and social reflection. Through this perspective, the article intends to reveal how The Reivers synthesizes Faulkner’s final concerns: confronting mortality, resisting oblivion, and exploring human paradoxes in a coherent and complex literary universe. A reading is proposed that simultaneously highlights the narrative inventiveness, psychological depth, and moral refinement of Faulkner’s late work, revealing its relevance in the study of Southern literature and the American modernist canon.
Keywords : Faulkner, The Reivers, morality, grotesque humor, initiation process

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