Tragi-comedy and comi-tragedy in "Pantaloon in black"

William Cuthbert Faulkner (1897–1962), the Prominent Representative of Northern Writers, was born in New Albany, Mississippi, the first of four sons to Murray Cuthbert Faulkner and Maud Butler. Faulkner, as an American novelist and short story writer, was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel. He wrote works of psychological drama and emotional depth, typically with long serpentine prose and high meticulously-chosen diction, also using ground breaking literary devices such as stream of consciousness, multiple narrations or points of view, and time-shifts within narrative.

A close study of Faulkner's works discloses an author who chooses to delve deeply into the complexities of modern man, and considers mixing tones. He does it in his work, "Pantaloon in Black", which embodies the spirit of the commedia dell’ arte, (Skei 124–125) through these tonal mixtures to describe ways in which a complex man can face the absurdities that life never ceases to deliver. the same theme is revealed through an immense tragedy of Rider, the protagonist, mourning for the sudden, unexplained death of his wife Mannie, Rider, distorted with grief, buries her in an almost violent way.