![]() ![]() Part two jumps back in time some 18 years, but it hardly matters. We know he loves his sister Caddy, and bemoans her absence, and the family life swirling around him includes funerals and frustrations and family divisions. It's a fascinating stream of conscious experiment that goes on for some eighty pages without much in the way of explanation or even punctuation. There are snippets of dialogue, smells, and the names of loved ones tossed about out of order as he absorbs the emotions of dramatic turning points throughout the story. He's mentally handicapped, incapable of normal speech, and experiences the entirety of the novel's events in a blur of non-linear impressions. ![]() We're brought into the story first through the eyes of Benjy, a man who's essentially been "three for thirty years". There is a high price of admission, but if you can afford to pay it the novel will yield rich and thought provoking returns that almost beg you to invest in a second reading. In fact, Faulkner went out of his way to make the beginning half of the novel as hard to read as a foreign newspaper, upside-down. But The Sound and the Fury is not mainstream. Kurt Vonnegut is always sold out at used bookstores, too, whenever I look. Great Gatsby, for example, or 1984, or much of Steinbeck. Wow, this one was rough. There are some so-called "literary" works which are eminently accessible to your everyday reader, and as such are quite popular in and out of the classroom. ![]()
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