Ratiocination


 * 1) the process of exact thinking
 * 2) a reasoned train of thought

Faulkner is well-known for his use of stream of conscious writing, especially in TSAF. He uses this narrative technique to demonstrate the free association qualities of the human brain. The complete lack of ratiocination is disorienting, but also fascinating as a reader. Ratiocination is a barometer by which a reader can determine the reliability of a character/narrator. Sherlock Holmes, for example, is one of the most highly intellectual and reliable characters in literature. Time and again he proves this through ratiocination – his use of deduction skills to solve impossible mysteries. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle based Holmes on C. August Dupin, an Edgar Allen Poe character. “In the space of three unusual short stories in the early 1840s, Edgar Allen Poe created the first pieces of detective fiction, with C. Auguste Dupin as their lead character…In Dupin’s concluding monologue in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ he declares, ‘My ultimate object is only the truth’ (19), a remark with a sentiment so natural to detective fiction today that it is easy to miss why it deserves a more thoughtful reading. Dupin's remark comes as an unapologetic defense of an imaginative, unorthodox method of reasoning, which Poe calls ratiocination and which can be best described as leveraging intuition to make sweeping connections between the tiniest of details” (Mackereth 1).

The effect is that we trust the character and we take him seriously. Conversely, a lack of ratiocination causes the reader to mistrust a character’s thoughts and actions. Logically, this should create distance between the reader and the character. Yet Faulkner’s narrative style actually draws us closer. Benjy’s train of thought is inexact and unreasonable. But it is full of connections and meaning. If the reader recognizes the free associative pattern, she is invited to read more carefully and think more critically about the character to uncover deeper meaning.

Readers must also admit that stream of conscious thinking is part of human nature. This actually creates a more personal connection to the characters who lack ratiocination, which is perhaps Faulkner’s intention.

“Looking about the scene her glance, her mind, her thought, went full and straight and instantaneous to the janitor sitting in the door of the furnace room. There was no **ratiocination** in it, no design. She just seemed to look outside herself for one moment like a passenger in a car, and saw without any surprise at all that small, dirty man sitting in a splint chair in a sootgrimed doorway, reading through steelrimmed spectacles from a book upon his knees…She went to him at once, already in motion upon the dingy path before she was aware that she had started” (LIA 116).

“Henry, the provincial, the clown almost, given to instinctive and violent action rather than to thinking, **ratiocination**, who may have been conscious that his fierce provincial’s pride in his sister’s virginity was a false quantity which must incorporate in itself an inability to endure in order to be precious, to exist, and so must depend upon its loss, absence, to have existed at all” (AA! 76)

Mackereth, Stephen. "Truth from an Infinite Number of Fictions?" Exposé (2012): 1-12. Http: expose.fas.harvard.edu/issues/issue_2012/mackereth.html//. Harvard College Writing Program. Web.

"Ratiocination." Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 07 Apr. 2017.