The Shrinking Forest (Race at Morning)
The loss of wild woods is an extended metaphor in this story representing how innocence is lost gradually, but forever. In a direct way, the loss of the wildness of forest metaphorically connects boyhood to “the business of mankind.” On a more abstract scale, the shrinking woods are a symbolic manifestation of the inevitable urbanizing of the South at the expense of its more innocent rural history.
The Mother's Dowry (Barn Burning)
Sarty’s mother is weeping as she sits in a wagon filled with all their meagre possessions. Most metaphorical of these belongings is that symbolic timepiece which is the embodiment of how her life came to a premature end long before death would ever actually arrive:
“the clock inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which would not run, stopped at some fourteen minutes past two o'clock of a dead and forgotten day and time, which had been his mother's dowry.”
Miss Emily
Miss Emily is one of Faulkner’s most potent of many metaphors for the slow decay and death of the Old South. Miss Emily inhabits metaphorically the resistance of ante-bellum Dixie to recognize that a change in the institution was necessary in order for America to survive. This stubborn refusal extends all around her: her rejection of the reality of death, allowing her fabulous mansion to crumble around her and, of course, the always present ticking of a watch only heard and seen (acknowledged).
Rumor (Dry September)
So powerful is the force of metaphor as a literal reality driving some to extreme lengths that Faulkner commences his story about a lynching with a simile that effectively communicates the potentially devastating and destructive capacity unfounded supposition can have on a community:
“Through the bloody September twilight, aftermath of sixty-two rainless days, it had gone like a fire in dry grass: the rumor, the story, whatever it was. Something about Miss Minnie Cooper and a Negro.”
Faulknerian Prose
In the story “Beyond” can be found a sentence that—while shorter than many others—is an iconic representation of the true genius of Faulkner; composing a sentence that is as delightful to read on its own without context as it is satisfying in its integration into the thematic whole of those sentences surrounding it. Read this sentence closely and study how the construction of the metaphor is more complicated than it may seem (no less than four commas in a sentence of just 35 words!) while the meaning is remarkably direct and unambiguous in conveying the idea of an average person being forced to confront an imaginary situation come to life.
“He was like a man who, not a swordsman, has practiced with a blade a little against a certain improbable crisis, and who suddenly finds himself, blade in hand, face to face with the event.”
