Audible Fear and Narrative Silence in Faulkner’s “That Evening Sun”

William Faulkner’s “That Evening Sun” has often been read through racial terror, childhood perception, and white Southern memory. This article argues that its crisis is organized as an acoustic narrative. Within the surface soundscape, Nancy’s voice, Jesus’s unseen threat, and the story’s repeated noises turn fear into an audible form. At the level of social hearing, white characters convert that sound into disturbance rather than evidence, exposing what Jennifer Lynn Stoever calls the sonic color line. In narrative form, spatial, social, and retrospective silences leave Nancy’s fate ethically unresolved. By tracing this movement from soundscape to racialized listening to narrative omission, the article shows that Faulkner’s open ending does not simply hide racial violence; it makes readers hear how such violence is socially ignored.