Where to start with Faulkner
As I Lay Dying gives fifteen voices, a dead mother, and a family crossing Mississippi; the difficulty has a body and a destination.
The Sound and the Fury lost you almost immediately, but Faulkner's account of memory, family, and the American South still calls.
Starting with The Sound and the Fury, hitting Benjy's opening section without warning, concluding Faulkner is wilfully obscure, and never going back. Or starting with Absalom, Absalom! — which assumes you already trust the Yoknapatawpha geography and the long sentence — and bouncing off the syntax before the moral architecture has time to work.
Books in order
- As I Lay Dying — Read it in two or three sittings. Watch how the chapter headings — Darl, Vardaman, Cash — train you to listen across a family the way Faulkner needs you to listen across his county. The errand is simple; the listening is the work.
- Light in August — Three strands — a pregnant girl walking, a man with no certain race, a fallen minister — woven through one Mississippi summer. The clearest place to see Faulkner's social weather doing its full work, and the prose is more patient than in the earlier and later masterpieces.
- The Sound and the Fury — Four sections, four narrators, one family unravelling. Read the appendix Faulkner added later before Benjy's section if you need a map; there is no shame in the help. The novel is scored, not narrated, and the Benjy section only works once you trust that the disorientation is the form.
- Absalom, Absalom! — Quentin Compson tries to tell the story of Thomas Sutpen and the South tells itself through him. The longest sentences Faulkner ever wrote, and the deepest argument about how the past keeps being the present. Read it last; it asks for the trust the earlier three have built.
Further reading
- Sanctuary — Faulkner's most plot-driven novel, sometimes recommended as an entry. Save it; the lurid material can mislead a first-time reader about the actual project, and the technique is sharper in As I Lay Dying anyway.
- Go Down, Moses — The late linked-stories book, including The Bear. Read it after the four major novels; the formal looseness rewards a reader who already trusts the Yoknapatawpha geography and the long memory the earlier books have built.