Mosquitoes (novel) - Major Themes

Major Themes

The hour-by-hour, day-by-day organization of the novel’s body sections suggests, in form as well as function, the nature of the days spent on the cruise ship, vastly repetitive and mundane. By grounding the repetitive activities of the characters in concrete temporal divisions, Faulkner gives structure to what might otherwise seem to be an endless stream of conversation and interaction between various combinations of the yacht’s passengers.

This intentionally mundane structural system also forces the boat and mundane preoccupations of the passengers (swimming, dancing, eating, etc.) to become a stage and props that serve the characters’ primary function as “thinly veiled mouthpieces function as rhetorical devices” through which Faulkner is able to work through major issues that he struggles to understand in his own life. He does this by inhabiting the characters’ various personas to address these themes either through their overt discussions or hidden thoughts. Regardless of how individual characters explore the themes, readers have access due to the third-person omniscient narration style that Faulkner utilizes.

Though many views on the contemporary culture of the 1920s American south could be drawn from the endless cultural references in Faulkner’s writing, two major themes manifest in the text and are explored both individually and in terms of their relation to one another. These are Faulkner’s explorations of sex and sexuality, as well as the societal role of the artist.