ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the way in which William Faulkner deploys pieces of the aforementioned historical discourses so as to interrogate narrative reliability. It argues that Faulkner discloses the contemporaneous legal, political, and social problem of miscegenation in the US during the segregation period as a problem of narrative reliability. The chapter argues that racial stereotypes inform the devices of narrative enigma, narrative progression, and polyphony that are responsible for the questioning of narrative reliability. It demonstrates that racial stereotypes are being used in their formal narrative possibilities. The chapter considers the uses of active racial stereotypes and political arguments as drawn by the New South Creed in the generation of a racially segregated legal and political system of power, as conditioning polyphony, narrative enigmas, and narrative progression, in their innovative and unsolved elaboration of the problem of narrative reliability.
