ANQ A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles Notes and Reviews· 2026Q1
Audible Fear and Narrative Silence in Faulkner’s “That Evening Sun”
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- 2026year
Short summary
Faulkner's "That Evening Sun" organizes its crisis as an acoustic narrative, making racial terror audible through Nancy's voice, unseen threats, and repeated noises, while white characters' social hearing converts this sound into disturbance rather than evidence.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- The article reinterprets Faulkner's "That Evening Sun" through the lens of acoustic narrative and racialized listening.
- Nancy's fear and the story's noises are presented as audible manifestations of racial terror.
- White characters' 'social hearing' dismisses audible fear as disturbance, not evidence, highlighting a 'sonic color line'.
- Narrative silences (spatial, social, retrospective) contribute to an ethically unresolved ending for Nancy.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
William Faulkner’s “That Evening Sun” has often been read through racial terror, childhood perception, and white Southern memory. This article argues that its crisis is organized as an acoustic narrative. Within the surface soundscape, Nancy’s voice, Jesus’s unseen threat, and the story’s repeated noises turn fear into an audible form. At the level of social hearing, white characters convert that sound into disturbance rather than evidence, exposing what Jennifer Lynn Stoever calls the sonic color line. In narrative form, spatial, social, and retrospective silences leave Nancy’s fate ethically unresolved. By tracing this movement from soundscape to racialized listening to narrative omission, the article shows that Faulkner’s open ending does not simply hide racial violence; it makes readers hear how such violence is socially ignored.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. ANQ A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles Notes and Reviews, 2026 · DOI ↗
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Field: Literature and Literary Theory
Literature and Literary TheoryArts and Humanities