My Faulkner

I haven't been a lifelong reader. I wish it wasn't true, but some things must be brought to the light, I suppose. I was a fan of the Harry Potter series in my youth (though I never read the seventh book - another sad confession), and I always read what was required of me in school. Even though I only began seriously getting into literature during my senior year of high school, William Faulkner was there long before. He also walked me through this journey, and now I have encountered him again.

I love Faulkner, but I also hate him. I love that he's familiar to me. I read A Rose for Emily in seventh grade and again when I was a junior, and if you asked me how I felt about it, I would say, "I like it, I guess."

When I decided to get into reading the summer before my senior year, I was at a Barnes and Noble in Seattle, standing at a table with a sign that said something to the effect of "If you're in high school and you like to read, these books are important." I scanned the selection and Faulkner's name jumped out at me. I decided to purchase As I Lay Dying not only because of the familiarity Faulkner's name, but also because the book shared a name with one of my favorite bands at the time.

I put the book on my shelf and forgot about it for a while. Before I read it, I also bought The Sound and the Fury, because a friend of mine recommended it to me. I decided to read both. This is when I grew to hate Faulkner.

I hated the long sentences. I hated the dialect in As I Lay Dying and how it jumped from character to character and how I wasn't sure who was a boy and who was a girl. I hated the long chapters in The Sound and the Fury. I hated how the same story was told four times, and how one of the chapters was not chronologically accurate because one of the characters was mentally retarded. I thought, "Who DOES that?" I finished the books - not because I wanted to, but because I knew I couldn't quit.

When I opened to Barn Burning, my first emotion was genuine excitement. Here was good ol' Bill Faulkner to provide me with some good times. But as I began writing this blog, I remembered all of the bad times I had had with Bill, and how much I grew to hate him. I really hoped Barn Burning would take me back to the good times. I figured that I was a more mature, more knowledgable reader than I had been at that time, so hopefully I would get something more out of Faulkner.

After reading this story and taking into account my past experience with Faulkner, I decided that Faulkner had mastered this method of storytelling. Once again, Faulkner uses the viewpoint of a child going through hardships to tell the story of desperation in the Great Depression/Dust Bowl era. Faulkner plays off the innocence of Sartoris to get the reader to sympathize with the desperation the family is going through. He does the same thing in As I Lay Dying as the children carry their mother's casket to be buried, the youngest children unaware of what is happening.

In the beginning, Sartoris does not understand the trial what his father has done. All he knows is that Harris is the enemy. This innocence carries the tone throughout the novel as he does not understand a world of desperation, violence, and his father's sinister ways. Faulkner does an excellent job of getting the reader to connect to the young character and decipher their situation through the eyes of a child. He reveals the harsh lifestyle of this time through a gentle medium.

In the end, my heart broke for Sartoris. I can't imagine that he fully grasped the magnitude of his father's death or the extenuating circumstances. That's when I realized that this was a common motif in the other novels I had read by Faulkner. It almost made me want to go back and read through those stories again, just so I could have my heart broken by these poor children again. Maybe I'm just a sucker for those poor kids.

Or maybe I'm just a sucker for Faulkner.