earticle

영어

“Wash”, one of a hundred-odd Faulkner’s short stories, deals with conflict between two white classes in the South. This paper focuses on how the hero, Wash, chooses a destructive action in the rigid social structure and ends his life tragically. Wash Jones is a poor white and cannot acknowledge his painful reality that the blacks are better fed and housed than he is. Instead, he idealizes and worships Sutpen, a Southern aristocrat, for life, believing in white supremacy. He even identifies himself with heroic Sutpen, but this is only his illusory world substituted for intolerable reality. His illusion, however, shatters and he becomes disillusioned when Sutpen treats his granddaughter and her baby inhumanely. Wash kills Sutpen not only for himself but for his whole class, because Sutpen’s evil is not independent and regional but prevalent in the world. Wash discards his humiliating servitude and becomes a figure with honor and dignity by resisting which is a virtue Faulkner admires and encourages.