SOURCE: "The Pattern of Nightmare in Sanctuary; or, Miss Reba's Dogs," in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 15, No. 4, Winter, 1969-70, pp. 503-515.

In the following essay, Rossky sketches a pattern of stasis and paralysis which produces a nightmare effect in William Faulkner's Sanctuary, contributing to its criticism of modern society and its commentary on the human condition.

Having demolished the once popular judgment of Sanctuary as simply a potboiler, a notion which stemmed usually from an incomplete reading of Faulkner's own comments, critics and scholars have for some years regularly accorded the book the serious consideration warranted by the author's honesty of intention.¹ Chiefly the tendency of the commentary has been to see the novel in some way as an attack on the modern world—an outpouring of indignation at the mechanization and dehumanization, the immorality and loss of spiritual values in the twentieth-century wasteland.² This rather overwhelming consensus...