ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the representations of medical practitioners in fiction, encompassing classic and contemporary literature. William Faulkner was born William Cuthbert Falkner in New Albany, Mississippi. William Faulkner is considered one of the most important "Southern writers". In The Wild Palms story the time is 1937. The protagonist, Henry (Harry) Wilbourne, is a medical doctor and a graduate of a respectable medical school who is four months short of completing a two-year internship at a reputable hospital in New Orleans. Throughout the novel Faulkner uses a feverish stream-of-consciousness writing style. Harry's inexperience and passivity hinder his integration into the unfamiliar outside world and he is unable either to finish his internship or obtain a paying job in the medical profession. The story, Old Man, is about two convicts evacuated from the Parchman State Farm Penitentiary during the catastrophic Mississippi flood. In these two narratives, Faulkner appears to impart the idea that a frightened and self-loathing man is paralyzed into inaction.
