The title comes from a scene in Homer's Odyssey, when Odysseus goes to the underworld and encounters Agamemnon, who tells him:
             Upon the Sword, raised up my hands to smite her,
             And shamelessly she turned away, and scorned
             To draw my eyelids down or close my mouth
             Though I was on the road to Hades' house.
             Here Agamemnon complains of the unfulfilled mortuary customs that leave him unreleased by his culture and family into peaceful death.
             So much of the work this term has been about unresolved matters-the inability to have a tragic vision, with its sense of purification (catharsis), restoration, and progress: in Twain, tragedy gives way to farce; in Hemingway, trauma replaces tragedy. Over and over again, we see in this class that writers judge their culture by how that culture treats its dead. Du Bois, say.
             Here Faulkner is no different. For Faulkner's target in some crucial ways is the New South, the vision of a progressive and modernized southern culture in the wake of the first world war, a vision that is severely compromised and undone by the great depression. Industrialization without prosperity. And Faulkner's book is about the fallacy of progress-and about the destructive effects of such vaunted change on the class of poor whites. While Faulkner himself was by no means poor white, he nonetheless felt like many southerners that his culture had reached a point of irreversible crisis-and that its best days were definitely a thing of the past. Faulkner understood the south he grew up in in terms of a narrative of decline: he was named after his great-grandfather, a civil war hero known as the "Old Colonel," who founded a railroad and co-founded a bank after the war; yet by the time Faulkner was reaching adulthood in the 1910s, the money and the prestige had run out. As if haunted by the specter of decline, Faulkner himself tried, like Hemingway, to enlist in the US Army, only to b...