Father Shegog’s sermon in the church scene in Faulkner's the sound and the fury : a behavioral hortatory analysis

Abstract EN

In the fourth section of Faulkner’s The Sound and Fury where Dilsey, the family forever servant, is focalized, a guest priest in the presence of a congregation of black people delivers a religious sermon which Dilsey attends bringing along with her Benji, the compson's idiot.

The present paper investigates the linguistic features of the religious sermon as a representative instance of hortatory / behavioral discourse that embeds within the narrative discourse.

It is obvious that the sermon breaks the narrative stance and establishes its own, but at the same time it contributes to the narrative by marking its climax.

Results crop out to expose that hortatory / behavioral piece, i.

e., sermon is both explicitly and implicitly singled out of the narrative discourse.

The hortatory discourse, which embeds within the narrative adopts and exploits certain linguistic formulas by way of distinction.

Though some of these features and distinctions are general as the four discourse types may have them in common, still some others are undoubtedly sermon-specific.