The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner · 1929
Faulkner gave four narrators (including one severely cognitively impaired) their own prose registers to tell the same story of a Southern family's disintegration. Chronology is dismantled. The difficulty is the point. Modern Library ranked it sixth; it won Faulkner the first of his two Nobels in spirit, if not on paper.
The case against
Benjy's opening section runs four decades of unmarked time-jumps narrated by a man who cannot tell them apart, and on a first read it is closer to noise than story. Faulkner knew this and let it stand. Most first-timers reach for the appendix and a chronology just to follow who is who. The difficulty is deliberate, and clearing it will cost you the hours.
Literary Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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