Some books you read and…Well, some books you don’t so much read as struggle through.
I recently read Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily” in “On writing Short Stories”, and I thought to myself, “Hey, this Faulkner guy’s not so difficult after all. This is pretty straight forward.”
However “The Sound and the Fury” is anything but straight forward. I think this is the most difficult book I’ve read since I had to read Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” for a Calvin class.
The book is divided into 4 different sections, the first 3 of which are different narrators going over the same events in Rashoman like style.
The first section is narrated by Benjamin, the mentally retarded brother. Benjamin has the inability to stay focused on one moment in time, and so his account jumps all over the place. He can only see events, but not realize their significance, so nothing is ever explained.
This section of the book reminded me a little bit of the movie “Memento”. Because everything is shown out of order, at first you have no idea what is going on, but if you stick through it, and resist the urge to throw this book across the room, eventually the pieces do start to come together and you can make sense of the story.
But if I had to do it over again, I think I would read the cliff notes alongside this book to help me sort out what is happening. Unless you want a real intellectual work out, you should probably have some sort of study guide alongside this book. There is no set up; you’re just thrown into the middle of the story. And to add to the confusion, three sets of characters share the same name, and one character even has his name changed.
The second brother, Quentin, is even more difficult. Benjamin may jump around in time, but at least his narrative is straight forward. Quentin also goes in and out of time, but Quentin thinks about the past in a stream of consciousness way which jumbles diverse ideas and images together. He’s also obsessed with his sister, and there’s a lot of Freudian ideas about incest thrown in here.
If you can make it as far as the 3rd brother, things finally start to make sense. The third brother, Jason, tells everything straight forward. He’s a bit of a jerk, but he’s one of those literary characters that you love to hate, so its fun to read.
And the fourth section is standard 3rd person omniscient narrative, very straight forward. Almost as if Faulkner is rewarding you for sticking with him till the end by finally making his story easy to understand.
This book can be pretty interesting at points, and it contains a lot of Southern colloquialisms that have a way of rolling of the tongue if you try and say them out loud. (“Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.”) But unless you like to struggle through books, I recommend tackling this one with a study guide next to you.
Useless Wikipedia Fact
The Red Scare periods ended May Day as a mass holiday in the United States, a phenomenon which can be seen as somewhat ironic given that May Day originated in Chicago. Meanwhile, in countries other than the United State and United Kingdom, resident working classes fought hard to make May Day an official governmentally-sanctioned holiday, efforts which eventually largely succeeded.
Link of the Day
I've heard through the grapevine that there's trouble in the Chimes office once again, as the usual spoof issue has been banned, and then published on-line. The offending spoof can be found at http://www.calvinspoof.com/
Also Phil has a couple posts on the subject, one giving his reactions, and one mentioning that the Chimes managing Editor was fired as a result.
Video Version
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