The Hamlet構築の問題点

Some Problems in the Composition of The Hamlet

Tanaka Hisao

中・四国アメリカ文学研究

Studies in American Literature

Incorporating "The Hound" (1931) into The Hamlet(1940), William Faulkner changed Earnest Cotton, a protagonist of the short story, into Mink Snopes. This change, far from a mere change in name, led the author to create "a different kind of Snopes," a type of man who, though abjectly poor, cannot forget "his rights as a man and his feelings as a sentient creature." Such a characterization of Mink serves to throw into relief the immorality and greed for gain of Flem Snopes, his cousin, who deserts Mink when he is being tried for the murder of Jack Houston. Furthermore, this characterization suggests the possibility that Mink, in the distant future, will visit revenge upon the status-seeking Flem. This suggestion helps to give the novel what is called an open-ended quality, which Faulkner has used in such works as Sartoris (Flags in the Dust) or Sanctuary.

The open-ended quality is what Faulkner intended for The Hamlet. Because he already gave in Sartoris a very brief outline of Flem's career since his appearance "behind the counter of a small restaurant" in Jefferson, it was necessary for the author to create an episode to bridge the period between Flem's departure from the hamlet and his appearance in the town. This bridge emphasizes Flem's outrageous shrewdness as he outwits Ratliff, who considers himself shrewder than Flem. Faulkner had prepared the situation in "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard" (1932), a short story in which Suratt (Ratliff in the novel) gives Flem "a lien on his half of the restaurant" as his share of the money to buy the Old Frenchman place.

Irving Howe's question about the plausibility of Ratliff's collapse at the end of the novel might be answered if we examine the instances in which his humanity gets the better of his sharpness in trading, and take into account the influence of the "stubborn tale" of the buried money upon his "curious, shrewd," and speculative nature. The tale told in the second paragraph of the novel, foreshadows the final episode of the buried money. The "usurpation of an heirship"—from which Jody Varner suffers because of his underestimation of Flem's shrewdness—likewise foreshadows Ratliff's final collapse, brought on for much the same reason. These two foreshadowings, connected with Flem's appearance in, and departure from, Frenchman's Bend, help to give the novel a dramatic framework, one which, structurally, seems to wall up the natural expressions of human feelings shown by such characters as Labove, Ike Snopes, Houston, or Mink, and symbolize Flem's style of living.

English and American literature [ 930 ]

jpn

中・四国アメリカ文学会

[ISSN] 0388-0176

[NCID] AN00341643