SOURCE: “Faulkner's Vestigal Christianity,” in Renascence, Vol. XXI, No. 1, Autumn, 1968, pp. 44-54.

In the following excerpt, O'Dea proposes that Faulkner's Christianity is seen through his emphasis on Christian virtues rather than in dogmatic statements or symbols.

In the dark woods of the modern novel, Faulkner is one of the few novelists who writes from a perspective of hope. He writes of violence, of human stupidity, of cruelty, of greed, of a brooding sense of evil in the universe, but in the midst of all this dark turmoil gleams a light, a hope that although most men fail, yet they are not doomed to failure and that in spite of all their petty vices and stupidities they will prevail. It is, perhaps, this ray of hope in Faulkner that moves so many critics to construct from his writings some sort of justifying Christian ethos, although they are often hard...