“I was assigned to read this novel for my english class in my junior year. This book was very compelling and interesting, but a little hard to understand and comprehend what was going on. This was because each chapter was written from a different perspective of a character in the novel. It was kind off all over the place and hard to follow. My favorite part in this book was when one of the most intelligent person burns down a burn. Considering he was so smart and a lot more literate than the other characters in this novel, you would not expect this. It was utterly shocking and confused me at first but i later found out why he did it. My favorite character was obviously the man who burned the house down, this was because i found him to be the most complex character throughout the book. He is also one of the biggest characters because he undergoes many changes and alterations throughout the book”
“the story is actually narrated by 11 (i think) different narrators. Each chapter moves from one to another, with each of the children having several chapters. The mother herself has only one chapter but it is a very important and enlightening one.”
“Read this in college, like 12-13 years ago, and thought it was good. Someone was asking about the voice in the story. If I remember the story correctly, was it not the mom, as she lay dying? (or dead) I seem to remember a long drawn out discussion of this in one of my college lit classes.”
“Finally read this one last summer --- prior to all the conversations about "multiple perspectives" in literature...”
“I'm going to have to echo the 'difficult' comments. It isn't just the fractured narrative that makes the book more challenging than most, it's the (presumably accurate) Southern vernacular. I suspect it wouldn't have been easy for the average American reader to understand back in 1930, let alone a British reader nearly 80 years later. That said, it's a beautiful book and one of my favourites.”
“it has to be a tribute to all the high school English teachers, this is the highest ranked Faulkner on the classic lit tag!”
“This is one of my all time favorite books---I re-read it every couple of years”
“Faulkner is difficult and this one is among his more challenging, but it's very powerful. Faulkner, it seems, was a force of nature. He's influenced Marquez among others. It's been years since I've read his work. I'm trying to get the courage to go back and reread some of the major novels. Cormac McCarthy is the closet thing we have to Faulkner among living writers. I've slowly reading "The Road."”
“cant say this is one of my favorites. it is excellent, but to me the malet, wild palms, light in august and go down moses absolom oh absolom stand apart from his more "middle work."With the exception of the sound and the fury, i do not find him a hard read, only a delicious one, but then i am a mississippian, maybe he speaks my language:)”
“gotcha.I think that one of the big explorations in the book is the relationship between the poor rural, and the middle class town-folk. I think that part of it is showing the exploitation of the sharecropping system, but I think that there's more to it than that. I really like the part where Darl, in the train, sees his family in the middle of the noise of the town, sitting in their wagon, eating bananas (someone pointed out to me that this is a Darwin reference). "Why are you laughing Darl?"”
