William (Cuthbert)
Faulkner (September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was one of the most important and
prolific writers in Southern literature, in the United States. He was born in
the state of Mississippi and therefore profoundly influenced by the southern
culture and history, but also by the education in arts and literature provided
by his mother and maternal grandmother. His Nanny, Caroline (Callie) Barr
provided a huge background on the African-American tradition and history, from which,
we could assume, derives his great dismay on the huge social, political and economic
misfortunes (for lack of a stronger word) of that community.
William
Faulkner won the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature for “his powerful and
artistically unique contribute to the Modern American Novel”. He also won two Pulitzer
Awards, one in 1955 for A Fable and
the other in 1963 (posthumous) for The
Reivers. In 1951 he received a US National Book Award for Collected Stories and another in 1955
for A Fable.
In 1927
Faulkner created the setting for most of his novels and short stories – a small
region in Northern Mississippi named Yoknapatawpha
County, with the town Jefferson
in its core. “That Evening Sun” was published in 1931, and the main characters
are the Compson children, being Quentin, the older son, the narrator. Like
the town Jefferson is the setting of
choice of the author, also The Compson family plays a main role in many
of Faulkner’s novels.
This short
story depicts the racial, social and moral contrasts in the southern society, and is marked by the stern criticism
of Faulkner towards the white community's relation with the African-Americans. It’s narrated by Quentin, when he is 24 years old and starts
remembering something that happened during his childhood, 15 years earlier. As
the story enfolds, the tone becomes more and more childish, showing the
children's incomprehension and empathy to Nancy’s despair and the lack of
understanding of the adults in their family.
A brief
note to the title — it comes from a black spiritual, whose first line
states: “Lord, how I hate to see that evening sun go down”, meaning that after
the setting of the sun, death would follow, giving an early indication of Nancy’s
fate.
I hope you
enjoyed it as much as I did, and I hope to read your thoughts and impressions
while reading it.
Madalena Athayde - 44440
Gostei bastante do desenrolar da história e principalmente da maneira como está escrita. Os diálogos permanentes e os à partes a explicar algo. Ao ler a história fiquei com duas perspectivas diferentes:
ResponderEliminar- Um amigo ao nosso lado a contar ao pormenor uma história sobre algo em que se passou com ele.
- Um filme/um teatro (algo visual), mas posto em texto, onde todos os pormenores contam (por exemplo, o permanente diálogo das crianças, muitas vezes irrelevante, mas que dá a sensação do que está a acontecer ao mesmo tempo que a acção principal).
Penso que em "That Evening Sun" Faulkner escreve de maneira simples, directa, e acessível, e consegue criar uma sensação de expectativa nas últimas páginas, em que não se percebe bem o que vai na cabeça de Nancy nem o que lhe vai acontecer quando a deixam em casa sozinha.
Por vezes, o texto faz lembrar um "memoir", onde são narradas situações específicas e os diálogos parecem as reflexões dos personagens sobre essas situações.
A maneira como está escrito dá também a entender os dialectos usados no contexto da história, assim como os diálogos permanentes dão a sensação (na minha perspectiva) de uma acção muito mais presente e viva.
Achei muito interessantes os comentários das crianças em relação à raça. As crianças em geral questionam-se sobre tudo à sua volta e projectam em voz alta o que lhes vai na cabeça e as perguntas que encontram. Penso que na história, quando alguma das crianças se refere a "nigger", a relação que fazem dessa palavra não é de cor, mas sim de rótulo. Nancy é "nigger" porque é o que elas ouvem, e não por uma questão de raça.
Jason faz vários comentários em relação a isso:
"Jubah is a nigger"; "Dilsey's a nigger too"
mas também:
"I ain't a nigger"," Jason said. "Are you a nigger, Nancy?"; "I ain't a nigger," Jason said. "Am I, Dilsey?"
Como é que será que Jason entende o significado da palavra? Ele próprio põe em questão o seu significado, não percebendo bem o que é afinal ser "nigger".
Beatriz Valle
As crianças são o "olhar inocente" que desmascara a farsa do racismo no Sul. Sabem que o qualificativo "nigger" tem um sentido pejorativo, mas não conseguem compreender todas as implicações sócio-políticas dessa categoria de exclusão.
EliminarThis story left me mystified after my first reading. I had to go through it again to get something out of it and even on the second reading it was tough going. Evening Sun doesn't reveal its secrets easily.
ResponderEliminarFrom the general, daylight perspective of the beginning, "Evening Sun" quickly narrows its scope to the night time experiences of one black woman, Nancy. Indeed, all of the narrative of the short story occurs at night. It is during the night that Nancy fears that her estranged husband, Jesus, will return and take his revenge on her. So palpable is this fear that her white employers escort her home and allow her to stay at their house.
Though there is also another character who is marked by his fear, the smallest of the children, Jason. Indeed Jason's fear shows up in close proximity to Nancy's own.
At first this interplay between Nancy and Jason probably suggest that "Evening Sun" is pointing out that fear is universal, whether it is experienced by white or black, young and old, man or woman. This is not so as if the fear is only attributed to those who society sees as not quite fully mature. Those who are afraid are Jason, a boy of five who everyone is constantly talking over and Nancy, a black woman of years "I ain't nothing but a nigger... It ain't none of it my fault" (Third page of our short story).
The story's final line is an admonition to Candace not to call Jason a "scairy cat". In this way the father is trying to separate his young son from the irrational ways of Nancy, the scared black woman.
Framing the story finally is the casual brutality which was everyday life before for black South Americans. In this time and place violence from whites is not only tolerated but expected.
Liliana Pascual nº46664
I would like to say that I really enjoyed this short story. This short story is a memory of what has happened fifteen years ago, an incident with Nancy, an African-American washerwoman. It is being told by one of the children. It goes on to discuss the racial issues of the Southern states at the time and how the white society treated African-Americans with little regard and disrespect. Nancy’s fear is never taken into account. She is pregnant, and her husband thinks that the child she carries is of a white man. Nancy is afraid of Jubah, her husband, killing her since he tells the children Nancy has a “watermelon” under her apron and that he hadn’t given it to her but that he could “cut it down, same as if it was.” Jubah is a violent man, and Nancy is now fearful of even walking home. We can see the disregard towards Nancy, who had every reason to fear for her life, when the children’s mother is appalled that her husband was walking Nancy every night to her house. The mother says : “How much longer is this going to go on? I to be left alone in this big house while you take home a frightened Negro?” I agree with what Beatriz said regarding the children mentioning the word “nigger”. I also believe that they use it more as a label and not a racial issue. This short story gives us an insight into how white, southern society behaved in a specific era in time.
ResponderEliminarSamanta Mello – 48753
ResponderEliminarThis was an amazing short story, very intriguing and also a big eye opener for those who are not familiar with this reality from not so long ago.
First of all, I see the need to mentioning the cultural differences between the two different races present in the story. Honestly, considering the time in which it is set, I find it amazing that the father ever took the time to take her home, even if that didn't last. Just it happening once is already admirable. The mother jealously, however, it's expected. I find it interesting that, despite they consider the black people inferior to them, she still feels worried about her husband cheating on her with Nancy. Shouldn't they think that no white men would ever care for a black woman? Of course this isn't possible, and Nancy pregnancy, as well as all the previous relationships with white men (which I'm sure are exclusively of a sexual nature) are a proof of that, but the white race arrogance should stop women from seeing the black women as "competition", in a way of talking. I guess this shows that, despite feeling superior, they could never truly deny that the color of their skin didn't stop the black from being actual people who had feelings and caused feelings and attractions in others.
However, this realization is forgotten when the matter doesn't affect the white society anymore. When it's something related strictly to the black community, it becomes irrevelevant what they might feel and what might happened to them. This happens when Nancy is afraid of her husband and her employers don't seem to mind the slightest about it. The biggest inconvenience for them is to find someone to replace if she is, indeed, murdered.
Aso, another peculiar aspect I'd like to mention is the ditch. Could it possibility be a metaphor for Nancy position? A ditch is a hole on the earth, a lower level of ground. It's as if, at the end of the day, she and the rest of her people should be reminded of their position in the world. It doesn't matter if they spend the day in a fancy luxurious house, if the white children like them or if their bosses show the least of care towards them, when they get home they need to literally sink in the earth, and be reminded they sleep on a lower level, an inferior place. Even when telling the story to the kids at night, Candance doesn't believe it when Nancy says that the princess needed to go through the ditch to get to her castle. A princess would never need to do such a thing. On the contrary - in fairy tales and such stories, the castle of the princess is always on the top of the hill, above the rest of the world, above the peasants that lived in the village. The ditch is the separation of this modern kingdom, with the white people on the top and the black people on the bottom.
Filipa Vieira, n46566
I'd like to finish off by mentioning the children. Is there a reason for the narrator to be so erased from the story? We know he is a part of the action because in a few lines, he actually shows up in dialogue, and Nancy mentions his name while walking with the children. Other than that, he looks more like a ghost than an actual character. Would that be such the author's way of writing, or is there a reason for the narrator to be so absent in the action? It might be a way of showing his personality. Because of this, he comes across as shy and not very social, usually simply going along with his siblings. But maybe, and this is my interpretation, it's his way of dealing with the situation. We must remember this is a memory from 15 years ago, so now the narrator is a grown man who can finally understand the meaning of it all. He finally knows the meaning of the word nigger, he understands that Nancy was pregnant from a white man and not hiding a watermelon in her dress, that her husband was out to kill her and his father left her there do die. Maybe now, all those realizations are overwhelming, and he has been taken with a sense of guilt. Although it's not his fault, he was simply an innocent child at the time, maybe the feeling that he could have taken an action is weighting on him. And, like it happens to all of us, a bad memory becomes a bit faded. We tend to forget we were a part of it and when we play it again in our heads, it feels like we are watching it from the outside. Maybe that's what led to his absence in the plot.
ResponderEliminarI'm sorry for this long post, but I felt compelled by the intensity of the story to go deep into it's meaning :)
Filipa Vieira, n 46566
That one time I’ve read Faulkner his writing seemed a tough cookie to me but “That Evening Sun” was much more palatable. With the underlying motif of this story being indifference towards another, Faulkner applies it to a racially-charged, deeply flawed social context. So, here we get a narrator who is apparently uninvolved with the story being told, as if it is just an afterthought of a memory, not a memory itself, offered to us in a very by-the-by way. Quentin’s recollections, at a fifteen years distance, are dreamlike and void of empathy towards the subject of the story. There isn’t a verifiable ending to it because no one around cared that much about what would happen to the shattered-faced, empty-eyed black woman left behind in the night, shivering and moaning about the darkness coming from the ditch to get her. Fear crawling Nancy’s skin as she trudges throughout the whole story helpless, desperate, at the same time dreading and accepting her fate.
ResponderEliminarI think this story is haunting. A presence we don’t see is mentioned many times and we’re told about the characters’ reactions to it. Nancy, Mr. Compson and the kids, all react to something/somebody not completely there. One could say the reason Quentin is telling this story is because now, fifteen years later, Nancy is haunting him. Maybe she is. Maybe the author took a hard look into the darkness of his country’s past and found many haunts lurking there, just waiting for someone to shine a light on their personal stories and pay those spirits their due tribute.
Nuno Miguel Lopes
Your comment made me remember Zora Neale Hurston's declaration in "“How It Feels to Be Colored Me”, when she characterizes "The position of [her] white neighbor [as] much more difficult," since "No brown specter pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to eat. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed." Indeed, Faulkner's writing deals with the oppressing sense of guilt of the white Southerners towards the black community.
Eliminar(By the way, you should consider giving Faulkner another chance and go back to his novels with an unprejudiced eye. It's really worth it!)
In the short story “That Evening Sun”, the author tells us the story of Nancy through Quentin’s memories of what happened “fifteen years ago”. I agree with my colleges about the race theme, the kids mother seems to be the one with more issues with this, she does not like her husband taking Nancy home nor the kids asking her to let her stay in their house, Jason question what means to be a “nigger” and Nancy uses that label to take the guilt of her shoulders "I ain't nothing but a nigger... It ain't none of it my fault". I hadn’t realized Quentin’s presence until someone actually said his name in the story. The language of the text seems oral in the dialogues, but it also seems a children story because of the way the author puts the dialogue (always with “Jason said”, “Caddy said”). It is very visual.
ResponderEliminarI liked the story but as my college I also had to reread to fully understand it.
Tânia Fortunato nº46517
This short story does indeed seem to develop an increasingly more childish tone backed up by a mathching dialogue and a sympathetic narrative. The author, being white, has forcefully adopted a perspective that departs from a somewhat opposite prism to that of Zora Neale Hurston, being a black woman who experienced first hand the segregation of negros in the South. This one seems to be marked obviously by the innocence of the characters, who are dragged into the social and cultural tribulations of the world of the adults, and caving in to the limitations and the oppression that make up part of the life of a black american below the Maxon-Dixon line, however not understanding fully what it means to be black, or the true meaning of prejudice, stereotyping and racism. They regard it as an horizontally different way of being, not vertical in the Darwinian sense. They therefor merely live out their lives as children who know they are different but not necessarily inferior, despite that they would use the fact that they're a "nigger" who "doesn't know any better" as an excuse to not understanding or not being capable of acomplishing something , they just think that's the intrinsicate order of the world, not that they somehow occupy a position of inferiority and servitude to the white man. So i look at the text as a time capsule seeing as the characters never grow up in the biological and the literal sense, forever imprisoning the misfortunes and injustice that the black man must bear, all wrapped in the midst of the purity and the childishness of the character's dialogue.
ResponderEliminarAndré Gomes nº 45352
First I would like to highlight the sentences that spoke louder to me:
ResponderEliminar"I can't hang around white man's kitchen," Jubah said. "But white man can hang around mine. White man can come in my house, but I can't stop him. When white man want to come in my house, I ain't got no house. I can't stop him, but he can't kick me outen it. He can't do that."
"I ain't nothing but a nigger," Nancy said. "It ain't none of my fault."
"I ain't nothing but a nigger," Nancy said. "God knows. God knows."
"I can't have Negroes sleeping in the house," mother said. Jason cried.
Nancy often denigrates herself by saying she's "nothing but a nigger", a obvious social consequence of the time, have you noticed that? I do not know what to say, pretty much of of my opinions about the subject have already been exposed. I especially agree with the fact that the children say "nigger" because it's a term and not a racial issue. Children here innocence portrayed in the middle of human brutality. Children are minds to be molded, because racism is something Human kind created and then inserts into one's mind. The most evident case of innocence is portrayed by Jason, the youngest child, who shares a feeling of fear with Nancy. He does not see Nancy as someone different from him but as a human being who deserves the same treatment she has given him.
I also agree with what Beatriz said regarding the children mentioning the word “nigger”. Regarding the narrator I share the same view that he looks more like a ghost than an actual character.
Neuza Machado nº44980
This short story is utterly fascinating, starting with a complete description of the streets and the urban vision William Faulkner provides, fifteen years after the short story had been unrolled, and passing through the the afro-american differences highlightes on the jobs they had back then. There is a tremendous racism present in the short story portraiting the coloured differences back on those days. The children had the notion that the employees were coloured but they didn't seem to have the notion of what being coloured meant or the word "nigger" meant at that time, so they were always using them and repeting them while listening to their parents or employees discussions. In a way the children represent the naive side of the short story, where the children are part of a pure and young mind that it's still to grow. The short story also represents a critic to the society that in a way forces children and infusesthem to be racists.
ResponderEliminarJani Rodrigues - 44014
Faulkner's "That Evening Sun" is a story that is able to convey the reader the prejudice that the negro population suffered without being obvious about it. It is told from the perspective of the children, whose innocence filters the injustice and fear that Nancy is feeling. She does everything she can to protect herself from Jubah, the ever present threat to her life, but even though the Father tries to help her, he can't do it for long. Nancy's life is entirely dependent on her employer's decision, and nothing else can be done because in this society a negro's life has no value. The narrator points us this clearly when he, at age 9, ignores the fact that Nancy might die and is only concerned about "who will do our washing now, father?". This can be seen as a display of either complete innocence or of racism built in deeply this society.
ResponderEliminarTeresa Garrocho 46056