![]() ![]() The Compsons are, to put it politely, in decline. He seems to know that the American story is rotting on the vine. And even if it is difficult to read the caricatured language of his black characters and the frequent use of ‘the n-word’ today, he does have significant black characters and they do disturb the dominant white myths that cause so much damage. Maybe it’s that we’re having another round of our awful battles about history and race, two areas that Faulkner struggled with mightily. I don’t know what made the strange summer of 2020 the right time to go back to Faulkner. Finally, on my third attempt and with the help of Spark Notes, I got enough of a hang of things to get to the second section and beyond, when the work starts opening up into a panoramic view of a family and a system that was doomed. The first section, written from the perspective of Benjy Compson, the intellectually-challenged son of a white Mississippi first family, is nearly incomprehensible on first read. When he published The Sound and the Fury, now recognized as an American classic, it confused folks more than wowed them. In 1929, William Faulkner had a keen sense that it was all falling in of its own weight. ![]()
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