That Evening Sun (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

Faulkner is often considered to be America’s greatest writer. His fame rests largely on his novels, which examined Southern society more closely than it had ever been examined before, but also relied on radical advances in narrative and fictional techniques. Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1949, Faulkner was a profound influence not only in the United States but also in Latin America, where such writers as Gabriel Garcia Marquez have expressed their feelings that Faulkner is unparalleled.

Although most critical writing on Faulkner is primarily concerned with his novels, Faulkner’s short stories are also frequent subjects for analysis. “That Evening Sun,” “A Rose for Emily,” and “The Bear” are his most famous stories. “That Evening Sun” first appeared in 1931 in the magazine The American Mercury, a very important journal that was edited at one time by the critic and writer H. L. Mencken. Its appearance in that journal indicates that Faulkner was already being taken seriously by the critics of his day.

Later that year, Faulkner included the story in his collection These 13.Most critics were impressed by the collection. Edward McDonald, in the Philadelphia Record, wrote that the stories in the collection display “their author’s apparently inexhaustible literary resources ... his haunting knowledge of the frustrations, the perversions, the imbecilities, in a word, the compulsions of all sorts which drive his men and women into behavior that swings distractedly from the uttermost in heroism to the uttermost in degradation.” Robert Cantwell of the New Republic felt that the stories were “brilliantly written” and remarked specifically of “That Evening Sun” that”we see that the real story is not the written one of Nancy’s foreboding, but the unexplained, unanalyzed condition of strain within the white family, the inner dissension, the battle for prestige that hampers the husband’s attempt to help when he first feels that help is needed.” But the eminent critic Lionel Trilling, writing in the Nation, was less enthusiastic, arguing that “despite the dramatic stress and portentousness of his work its implications are too frequently minor.”

In 1950, Faulkner issued a volume of Collected Stories in which “That Evening Sun” was included. In the intervening nineteen years, Faulkner’s reputation had grown immensely, and critics were largely united in their opinion that he was one of America’s major writers. Some felt, however, that Faulkner was too preoccupied by the darker side of the human experience. William Peden, in the Saturday Review of Literature, wrote that Faulkner was “the most considerable twentieth-century writer of short fiction” and that “That Evening Sun” was one of his best stories. Peden regretted, however, that many of the stories in the anthology “serve only to illustrate the melancholy fact that even a very great writer can be very bad at times.” Time, too, reported that Faulkner was”a writer of incomparable talents who has used and misused those talents superbly and recklessly.”

Many later critics have read “That Evening Sun” not as a story in its own right, but primarily as an addition to the mythology of Yoknapatawpha County and the saga of the Compson family, whose downfall is told in The Sound and the Fury.The man who is perhaps Faulkner’s best reader and most prominent critic, Cleanth Brooks, writes that in the story,

the Compson children have already assumed the personality patterns that we shall find later. Though they are too young to fully understand Nancy’s desperation, Caddy and Quentin at least respond to the Negro woman’s terror with concerned curiosity and, insofar as they are capable, sympathy. Jason is already a wretched little complainer, interested neither in Nancy nor in his brother and sister.” Another critic, James B. Carothers, sees the story in primarily historical and social terms, arguing that Nancy is figured as a “doomed victim of the racial, sexual, and economic matrices by which she is defined.

Other literary scholars have concerned themselves more with the formal aspects of the story, often pointing to Faulkner’s use of narration as the heart of what the story is trying to convey. Hans Skei identifies the narration as the central point of the story, writing that“the discrepancy between the limited point of view of the child narrator and an experience beyond his comprehension is modified by the fact that the child has become an adult at the time of narration.” Skei appreciates the “great sympathy and empathy” of the story. James Ferguson also notes the narration, writing that “those who argue that Quentin fails to understand the plight of Nancy misread the story. The increasing silence of the boy in the final scenes and his unforgettable culminating question, ‘Who will do

our washing now, Father?’ suggest that Quentin does understand that that Jesus will murder Nancy.”