Deconstruction and Affirmation: Anti-Heroic Writing in Faulkner’s Soldiers’Pay

As William Faulkner’s first full-length novel, Soldiers’Pay focuses on the impact of World War I and explores themes such as war, trauma, which heroism, which stands as a significant contribution to the literature of the American “Lost Generation.” By depicting war, desire, and heroic ideals through a critical lens, Faulkner constructs a distinctive mode of anti-heroic writing. On the level of war narrative, the novel rewrites the Homeric motifs of “wandering” and “homecoming” found in the ancient Greek epic The Odyssey, creating an anti-heroic account of war. In comparison with Ulysses, another parodic reworking of The Odyssey, Faulkner’s understanding and redefinition of heroism are brought into sharp relief. In its treatment of desire, the novel offers a realistic and daring portrayal of soldiers’impulses, thereby dismantling the heroic ideal and showing that they possess no greater moral resolve than ordinary individuals. A comparative reading with The Sun Also Rises further illustrates Faulkner’s unique approach to the representation of sexuality. On the level of heroic values, the novel depicts the estrangement between civilians and soldiers, thereby exposing the external erosion of heroism. When placed alongside Hemingway’s fiction, Faulkner’ s dialectical reflection on war and heroism becomes particularly evident. As the starting point of Faulkner’s novelistic career, Soldiers’Pay lays a conceptual foundation for his enduring engagement with the themes of war, sexuality, and heroism—topics that would come to shape the thematic architecture of his broader literary corpus. In this novel, Faulkner deconstructs the traditional, externally constructed image of the hero and begins to reimagine heroism from within, forging a spiritual core that underlies his subsequent works.