Book 19: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

I never really cared for American Literature until I discovered Hemingway.  Now that I've read most of his works I'm expanding to Faulkner.  This book was probably assigned in high school English class so it's been something I always felt I should read.  

348 pages in this one, a leisurely 50 pages per day.

REVIEW:  This book took a little while to get into.  Not only is it a stream-of-consciousness style novel, but it jumps around in time and space and has a confusing cast of characters.  Along with the confusing cast and the jumps in time and space you also have sections with no punctuation and others where Faulkner gives dialogue from Southern black characters which he spells out phonetically, “Dont you dare come in dis do widout a armful of wood.  Here I done had to tote yo wood en build yo fire bofe.  Didn’t I tole you not to leave dis place last night befo dat woodbox wus full to de top?”

Once I got into the correct stride, however, the book became much more readable and I began to be able relax and enjoy it.  It’s a rather sad story about the downfall of a traditional Southern family.  Each of the characters feels the loss of status and property in different ways but it’s all pretty melancholy. 

What I found most interesting about the whole story was the relationships between the blacks and whites in the novel.  It’s a complicated interplay.  The blacks have been free for some time now, but they are still segregated into their own communities.  The town’s white population have a complicated view of their black neighbors and seem to spend a lot of time agonizing over it while the black population has the view of “You tend to yo business en let de whitefolks tend to deir’n.”

Probably my favorite passage in the book comes from this narrative and takes place when Quentin, the eldest son, reflects on the relationship between blacks and whites:

“When I first came East I kept thinking You’ve got to remember to think of them as colored people not niggers, and if it hadn’t happened that I wasn’t thrown with many of them, I’d have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.  That was when I realized that a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior…”

Well said.  All in all, I really liked the book, though it was rather sad.  I’d give it about an 8 out of 10.