Faulkner Discussion

Avoid Faulkner's less fiction-oriented works. As I Lay Dying is probably the essential highschool Faulkner work, some of his Southern Gothic horror may be of interest as well.
Denser texts like The Sound and The Fury and Absalom! Absalom! will likely require guided study in order to fully make sense, while more "grounded" works like The Unvanquished suffer heavily from Faulkner's suffocating prose (as a student greatly interested in Southern Civil War heritage, TU was one of the only texts I outright dropped in highschool. It is mind numbing).

Keep always in mind that Faulkner was a man to spend months at a time developing settings and characters that may appear for only a chapter and suffers, to a less notable degree, many of the flaws Tolkien does in his attempts to translate this hyperrealism to text. He also infamously shit talked Hemingway's writing style for not requiring a dictionary in order to be legible, so that tells you a lot about his own style.

>>8924672

just want to say i appreciate this well-considered post, keep it up

>>8924672
Thanks for the insight, I really appreciate it. One of the few I bought was absalom absalom. I did a little bit of research before purchasing it and it is probably the one I'm most excited about reading. I'll be sure to keep a dictionary handy too!

>>8924672
Good post.

OP, I'd suggest starting with The Sound and the Fury and then moving on to As I Lay Dying. Those are generally conisdered Faulkner's best works alongside AA which is a bit more inpenetrable than the former two.

I think that light in august is pretty accesible compared to his other books.