A Study Guide for William Faulkner's "Intruder in the Dust"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for William Faulkner's "Intruder in the Dust," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535826136

Book preview

10

Intruder in the Dust

William Faulkner

1948

Introduction

Intruder in the Dust, first published by Random House in 1948, is a novel by William Faulkner that defies easy description. On the surface, it is a classic whodunit, a murder mystery after the manner of the Sherlock Holmes stories written by British author Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930). In Intruder in the Dust, a man is falsely accused of murder; much of the plot of the novel involves unraveling what actually happened, finding the real murderer, and setting the innocent man free. What complicates this basic, simple situation is the time, the place, and the race of the characters: the man accused of murder is black, the victim is white, and the story is set in Mississippi long before the civil rights movement. This is the era of what is still called Jim Crow, a collective term for all the rules that kept blacks and whites separate in the southern United States, the states that had formed the rebellious Confederacy during the American Civil War (1861-1865). Further complicating the situation is the personality of Lucas Beauchamp, the accused black man. He is a man who, throughout his life, has refused to obey all the subservient rules of Jim Crow, and for being so uppity, to use the old Southern slang term, he is in particular danger of being lynched—of being hauled out by an angry crowd and summarily hanged.

These are familiar themes in Faulkner's work. Much of his writing, including Intruder in the Dust, is set in a fictional county in Mississippi he called Yoknapatawpha, and in that writing, race relations play a central role. The reader first approaching Faulkner should be aware that he tries always to represent the speech of his place and time realistically, so racial slurs are present throughout, sometimes on every page. These slurs were a part of everyday speech in that era, in constant use by most people. The novel was a financial success, was made into a film, and did much to repair both Faulkner's finances and his reputation as an author at a point in his life when both were in danger of failing.

Author Biography

William Cuthbert Falkner—Faulkner himself later changed the spelling of his name—was born on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, and was the eldest son of Murry and Maud Butler Falkner. He was named William after his great-grandfather, a dashing figure who had fought as a colonel in the Civil War, been a successful businessman, published a best-selling novel, and been killed in a duel. His was a hard act to follow, and Faulkner's own father did not live