Another "classic" waste of time?

[wombat_socho]

One of the books I picked up last night was William Faulkner's highly regarded novel The Sound and the Fury. Having wrapped up the new Turtledove novel last night, I packed this one along today, since I usually read something over lunch to give my eyes a break from the computer screen. This is the third Great Novel (after Stendal's The Red and the Black and Sinclair Lewis' Main Street) that I've taken a stab at, and while it's still early I think this one is going to meet the same fate a the first two, namely, tossed aside onto the pile of books to be disposed of.

Perhaps I've been spoiled by my early exposure to the clear prose of writers like Robert Heinlein, William Manchester, and Thomas Wolfe, but having a deaf & dumb retarded man serve as the narrator of a novel strikes me as a rather opaque way to write a novel. The stream of consciousness technique Faulkner uses also makes the story hard to follow, since there's no clear plot line, just a somewhat random series of events that don't seem to connect with each other very well. Maybe it'll make more sense the further I get into it, but I have my doubts. It's certainly not the kind of writing I remember from reading "Barn Burning" all those years ago in high school.

Comments

[chebutykin.livejournal.com]

The problem with The Sound and the Fury is that it was originally intended to be printed in nine different colors. Each narrator would have their own color of text. Unfortunately, the cost proved to be unweildy at the time, so the whole thing was printed normally. Since then, the original color notes have been lost.

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

Great. Just great. And in all this time nobody's managed to figure out who's saying what when? What the heck have we been paying all these American Lit professors for all these years? (HHO1/2K)