SOURCE: DeShong, Scott. “Towards an Ethics of Reading Faulkner's Sanctuary.” Journal of Narrative Technique 25, no. 3 (fall 1995): 238-57.

In the following essay, DeShong attempts to provide a framework for reading Sanctuary “for human and humane value.”

In this reading of William Faulkner's Sanctuary, I will interrogate the idea of character in narrative and examine a problematic relationship between character and ethics. In doing so, I will gesture toward an ethics of reading that might avoid manipulation of the reader, of the text, and of what in a reading experience the reader takes to be substantive human feeling. I can make this gesture only by approaching ethics through close attention to the narrative text. I dispense with an introductory framework of theoretical argument because I mean to move toward an ethics of reading, not to delineate such an ethics: indeed, the latter would transgress ethics itself, insofar as ethics is...