How to Read William Faulkner
Begin with As I Lay Dying if you want a first Faulkner novel. However elusive a speaker becomes, the Bundrens still have to get Addie to Jefferson for burial. The physical task can hold you while the voices disagree about what deserves attention. For a shorter first encounter, try “Barn Burning”: a hungry boy, his accused father, and a court convened inside a store already put family loyalty under considerable strain.
Keep an action within reach while you listen to the person explaining it. A grievance may govern what gets remembered, an ambition what gets omitted, and a report what somebody thinks they know. Restoring all the events to a timeline can help with a particular confusion; it cannot tell you why the telling has taken this shape.
The examples here concern opening situations and early passages. They leave the novels’ endings and concealed family relationships undisclosed.
The court in the store
The store in “Barn Burning” is full of food Sarty Snopes cannot eat. Hungry, he attends to shapes and imagined smells while adults conduct a hearing about a burned barn. His father stands accused. From where the boy is placed, he can hear more of the exchange than he can see, and he expects that his father will want a lie from him.
You already have enough to continue: a place, an accusation, and a child for whom testimony may become an act against his family. The Snopes family's larger history can wait. The first difficulty is happening close enough to hear.
Listen to the change from his father's enemy to “our enemy.” Sarty has entered the quarrel through a pronoun. That small act of enlistment can be felt before we decide what he ought to do, giving loyalty some of the speed with which it takes hold inside a child.
The third-person telling comes close enough for his judgment to color a sentence, then reaches beyond what he can presently know. Watch where it moves. A child's fear and an older narrative intelligence can share a passage without giving every assertion the same owner.
Read through the hearing before turning to commentary. Then try stating the immediate predicament plainly: a boy may be asked to testify, and truth could estrange him from his father. What remains uncertain now has a scene around it. You can return to the sentence with a reason to find out more.
A journey holds the voices together
Use the named headings in As I Lay Dying. Add a relationship to a small list when the book gives you occasion to need it. You do not have to learn everyone's advance biography before Darl and Jewel can approach the house or Cash can continue his work.
In that opening, Darl and Jewel take different ways past a building; Cash is working at the box Addie will occupy. Then Cora takes over, with chickens, eggs, and cakes she expected to sell. We have stayed near the same household and entered a different economy of attention.
Cora has made ingenious calculations about the cakes. When the order fails, she keeps finding reasons why they have cost her little after all. Addie is gravely ill nearby; the thought can still come back to a customer who ought to have paid. Read this practical self-defense aloud. The ordinary disappointment persists beside a deathbed with a tenacity that can be funny and recognizably human.
Let a new voice change your estimate before forcing it into a family explanation. The burial journey continues, but each person has investments in the trip that may become more visible in a digression than in an account of the road. A chapter can leave the cart where it was and still alter what you think is traveling in it.
Which Faulkner should you read next?
The books ask for different kinds of attention. Choose a route according to what you want to follow.
If you want… | Choose… | What will help you stay with it |
A concentrated conflict in a short story | “Barn Burning” | Follow Sarty’s changing relation to his father, and separate what he hears from what he thinks he must do. |
A novel with a continuing physical task | As I Lay Dying | Use the speaker headings and the burial journey; listen for the private purpose carried by each voice. |
A family encountered through sharply different forms of perception | The Sound and the Fury | Read the sections in their printed order. Keep their dated settings available as broad bearings; expect remembered scenes to interrupt them. |
A history assembled through conversations, inherited reports, and conjecture | Absalom, Absalom! | Note who is telling, whom they heard it from, and where an explanation begins to outrun what they could have witnessed. |
A longer stay in a community, with trade, gossip, and social ascent | The Snopes trilogy: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion | Follow that publication sequence and allow the expanding cast to accumulate. Consult a map when a particular relationship obstructs the scene. |
A workable route is the short story, then As I Lay Dying, then either The Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom!. In the former, immediate experience and remembered scenes disrupt one another; in the latter, a history keeps changing through the people who tell it. Neither book is a qualification you must earn before attempting the other.
If Absalom, Absalom! attracts you most, begin there. Rosa Coldfield wants Quentin Compson to hear about Thomas Sutpen. Her urgency is available before the whole history is, and an unexplained reference need not prevent you from hearing what she is trying to make her listener feel. Let the telling take place before demanding complete possession of what is told.
When to stop and reread
When a passage seems to start again, check what has changed. Have we moved to another time, or has another speaker supplied a new explanation of the same event? A remembered scene, a repeated report, and an imagined encounter need different entries in your notes. Adding a date to each may obscure the difference that matters.
Keep perhaps, might, and must have attached to the scene that follows. A conjecture can become so vivid that its qualifying entrance recedes from memory. The detail of a room does not tell you who could have witnessed its conversation. Go back to the words that licensed imagining it.
For a long sentence, find the main action and return along its qualifications, interruptions, remembered remarks, or developing image. Reading aloud may let you hear the sentence resume a course your eye has lost. If a pronoun has escaped you, recover the last named person before guessing several pages farther on.
Make the note that removes a recurring obstacle: a name, the present setting, a question you expect to meet again. A second manuscript recording the first can become exhausting to consult. On rereading, keep Faulkner's order. Knowing later facts changes the earlier pages in ways a rearranged chronology cannot reproduce.
Family names, maps, and the county
Yoknapatawpha County rewards a second visit through a familiar place or surname. Each book still makes a local entrance possible. You can learn a family by attending to the person who needs something in the scene, letting its history accumulate as other people remember it differently.
Maps become useful when the same confusion keeps returning. Our Compson family and character map discusses The Sound and the Fury in full, including its ending; consult it only if you are comfortable with those disclosures. The Snopes trilogy relationship map likewise covers all three novels and their endings. Both are reference aids rather than prerequisites.
On an early reading of The Sound and the Fury, make your smaller list from people you have actually encountered. A complete genealogy can resolve a confusion while also taking away the experience the coming pages were arranged to produce. Choose the exchange knowingly when you consult one.
Questions that tend to arise
How much confusion should I tolerate?
Continue while you can hold on to an action, a speaker, or a desire. A later passage may give an unexplained reference its setting. If all three bearings have gone, recover one before proceeding; endurance alone will not restore a sentence you have stopped understanding.
Should I read a summary first?
A premise and short cast list are enough to begin many of these books. For As I Lay Dying, the burial journey provides a good foothold. A full family synopsis of Absalom, Absalom! gives away discoveries through which the telling does its work. Start lightly, and use a fuller summary if it becomes the condition of enjoying the next page.
Does italic type always mean a change of time?
Treat italic type as a cue to inspect, not an infallible clock. Confirm the people, action, and relation to the surrounding passage; a change of time need not coincide with a conspicuous printed boundary. Check your ebook's italics and paragraphing before trusting the typography to guide you.
What should I do with dialect and racial language?
Hear dialect for rhythm and relations between speakers, as well as for social position. Pronunciation will not tell you who is intelligent or truthful. Racial contempt demands attention to who speaks and whose judgment the narration takes up; the novel offers no convenient guarantee that every offensive expression belongs to an already discredited voice. Historical familiarity can explain where a term comes from. Its work in this sentence remains a reading question.
Must I read the county’s history in chronological order?
No. Shared families and places make further reading richer, but the novels regularly deliver the past through later recollection and report. Begin with a single work. If you choose the Snopes trilogy, follow The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion before trying to reconcile every overlap between them.
Read the first hearing in “Barn Burning,” or the first two speakers in As I Lay Dying. Ask what happened to your attention when another person began arranging the scene. The pleasure—or resistance—you feel there is a better guide to the next book than the wish to conquer a difficult author.
Sources and Further Reading
William Faulkner, “Barn Burning,” opening court scene; digital text in The Faulkner Reader.
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying, Standard Ebooks digital edition, especially sections 1–2.
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, Project Gutenberg 75170, the four dated sections; Random House printing.
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, Random House first-printing text (1936), Faded Page digital edition; especially Chapters I and III–IV.
The linked Compson and Snopes maps supply fuller relationship references, with the spoiler scope stated above.
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