Analysis of the novel "Sanctuary" by William Faulkner: plot and main themes

"Sanctuary" is a novel that was written by the English author William Faulkner.

Plot and Setting

The plot of the novel is bare, essential, as well as the lugubrious and tedious setting.
The tangle of the characters reflects the tragedy of events without a definite scan, facts and feelings always experienced in a precise moment, facing unpredictable space-time jumps, chaos, broken dialogues, elisions, joints in a puzzle that even has a basic logic , a phagocytizing and disorganized tragedy to show its appearance and substance.

Illegal Distillery and Popeye

Between Mississippi and Missouri, in the years of Prohibition and the Great Depression, in a deep and remote corner of America, there is a clandestine distillery run by a heterogeneous group of stragglers and criminals led by the notorious Popeye, an enigmatic man with an unsettling past with a present equally nebulous and chilling.
The apparently casual arrival of Temple Drake, seventeen years old with detached eyes, rapacious and discreet, will start a spiral of desire, violence and death, triggering chain reactions and unexpected events.

Crime and Investigations

Popeye, in his slow and guarding gait, violates the intimacy of Temple sadistically and becomes stained with a crime committed with voracious coldness. The truth will be avoided and the investigations will lead elsewhere legitimizing an unfounded accusation, but the evil is at home, it will strike on the protagonists and in the final, mockingly, on Popeye himself.
None of the characters is saved, there is no catharsis, the evil imprisons and continues to coagulate the events, the first eighty pages chase a track that the reader is struggling to find, there is a consequentiality of facts, but an interlocking of feelings, of smells, a filth and shamelessness that embraces everything, dark places and lost souls, a stomach punch in a fusion of intimately connected heterogeneity.

Expectation and Fear

One lives in expectation and fear, the same one that the characters feel, and of prolonged violence, for what we already know will happen and it has already happened, the scent of evil pervades everywhere, it is daily life, filled with dry dialogue, silent violence, of looks and movements in the shadow, of an organized chaos (by the author) that seems to want to say: this is the cruelty of life, no hope or possibility of redemption or salvation.

World in Decline

It is a world adrift, corrupt, filthy, merciless, sadistic, forgotten, indiscriminately embracing every social stratum, the protagonists merge indiscriminately into a suffocated breath, in that all that is nothing, if not a looming and remote threat always present.
The author makes the events speak, he mixes different ingredients with due diligence, he refrains from any judgment, even if the yellow interwoven in the second part dispenses a certain strength to the story, until that moment amazing.