Broken Clocks, Reclaimed Spaces: Melancholy and Resistance in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Ghassan Kanafani’s All That’s Left to You

Abstract

This paper explores the themes of melancholy and resistance in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Ghassan Kanafani’s M? Tabaqq? Lakum / All That’s Left to You (1966). Reincarnated in Kanafani’s work, the characters in Faulkner’s novel oscillate between past and present, experiencing a sense of imperial anxiety that casts a melancholic shadow over them due to colonialism or the fall of imperial “empire”. Following Faulkner’s Quentin and Jason Compson as well as Kanafani’s Hamid and Maryam through their day and night journeys, this essay studies motifs such as the wall clock, the wristwatch, and the land offering a postcolonial analysis of time and space. It concludes that while the colonized individual uses this melancholy as a means of resistance, finding in it a threshold to voice and identity, the colonizer, faced with this resistance, experiences a melancholy that prompts a reevaluation of prevailing colonial concepts.