Recently, I started reading The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. I am ~50 pages in and I don’t understand any of it. The stream of consciousness narrative is infuriatingly hard to read, and the storyline jumps across decades without any warning. What are some techniques I can use to improve my comprehension of the book?
The entire book is actually just the greatest troll in the history of literature!
The beginning section, Benjy, is a bunch of different narrative timelines spliced together and switched out of order. Wait until you get to the Quentin section. It gets even worse.
Read reviews of the book rather than the book. If you are concerned the reviews of the book will not be as accurate as the book, or in some sense there is something to the book you won’t get from the reviews I suggest
1) The reviews will tell you why the book is famous, which is probably why you set about reading the book in the first place. The reviews of the book will tell you more efficiently why the book is famous than you could ever expect to gain from reading the book itself. If you determine the the reasons the book is famous are sufficient for you to want to read the book, it will be easier to tolerate your own anger as you read it.
2) On the off chance that the reviews of the book somehow miss the true literary point of the book, there is a vanishingly small probability that you will repair that deficit in your own reading.
3) On the chance that the book is only thought to be good but is not actually good (whatever that means), you will at least know why it was thought to be good, which is ultimately what brought you to the book in the first place.
Just as with anything else modern, modern literature, at least some of it, is written for a small audience made up of the kind of people who like modern literature and read a lot of it. Its like reading a physics paper not being a physics graduate student, or looking at abstract modern art not being an insider on that particular thing.
In that vein: why look at a sunset, when you can have someone describe how they look? Why go on a rollercoaster when you can have someone describe the sensation to you? Hearing a secondhand summary of an aesthetic experience != that experience.
If a review of The Sound And The Fury were as good to read as the book itself, then why would Faulkner bother writing the former instead of the latter? (Then again, I suppose Borges did famously take advantage of that shortcut.)
If you aIf you aIf you If you are reading the book to read it and enjoy it,, yay! The OP said he was reading the book and hating it. and wondering how to understand the book.
When someone asks about solar hydrodynamics do you object to the recommendation of a textbook? Why don’t they just get a telescope and smoky lenses and take the data and derive the theory for themselves?
There is more than one way to understand something. If one is not working, try another.
I guess we have different interpretations of charlemango’s motivation here. I assumed they (“they” because I don’t know his/her gender) were seeking to get some aesthetic enjoyment from the book but were struggling to do so. On the other hand, you state that they are probably reading it to determine why it’s famous. This seems strange to me: I don’t think someone would try reading a book for only this reason. I agree that if that is were indeed someone’s motivation for reading a book, they’d be as well reading the reviews.
Edited to add: there’s some insight in your claim that modernist literature is, in some sense, aimed at an audience of specialists.
The OP may have assumed that the book being famous would therefore also be unusually enjoyable. This might be a bad assumption, or it might be a good assumption, but the book is only unusually enjoyable for people who are properly prepared to read the book with particular bits of historical and/or literary knowledge in place.
That the OP persists in trying to wrest enjoyment from a book which is clearly not giving enjoyment to them suggests that the OP would be best served understanding more about why she thought to pick up this book in the first place. Whether the extra knowledge allows her to enjoy the book, or whether the extra knowledge makes it clearer to her why she will not enjoy the book, given what I know about reading books or seeing movies 50 or 100 years after they are produced, that learning the context will be revealing and valuable in many ways.
So even if the goal is enjoying the book, their best shot is to learn the history, learn why the people who rate this book so highly do so.
Whether the extra knowledge allows her to enjoy the book, or whether the extra knowledge makes it clearer to her why she will not enjoy the book, given what I know about reading books or seeing movies 50 or 100 years after they are produced, that learning the context will be revealing and valuable in many ways.
Agreed. My only point of disagreement is that this is a sufficient substitute for reading the thing itself, as opposed to a supplement to it. (In my own reply to the OP I suggested looking at a study guide.)
If you can find a decent study guide (online, or, if there’s a physical edition, then secondhand copies of it will doubtless cheaply available on Amazon from students who are done with them), then reading that along with the book isn’t cheating. Reading notes for something which is fiction and therefore ostensibly ‘leisure’ reading may seem a bit absurd, but I think it can perhaps be justified. Aside from anything else, it can supply useful context not otherwise easily available to those not living in early twentieth century America and/or part of the high modern literati.
Whether or not you want to invest that kind of effort over and above what you’re already doing is your call, though.
It is a hard book. I read it when I was a rather high-minded teenager, surely understanding very little of it, but it’s actually a little hard for me to conceive of myself reading something so difficult now.
Build up to it by reading other books by the same author or in the same style. As I Lay Dying is supposed to be easier. Woolf is also stream of consciousness. Henry James is modern but less stream of consciousness. Or you could try his brother, William.
Recently, I started reading The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. I am ~50 pages in and I don’t understand any of it. The stream of consciousness narrative is infuriatingly hard to read, and the storyline jumps across decades without any warning. What are some techniques I can use to improve my comprehension of the book?
What are you trying to optimize for? Are you sure the experience you’re having now isn’t the whole point of the thing?
Are you saying the whole point of the book is to confuse readers?
I was thinking that might be part of the experience the book was trying to induce, yes. Something along the lines of this.
The entire book is actually just the greatest troll in the history of literature!
The beginning section, Benjy, is a bunch of different narrative timelines spliced together and switched out of order. Wait until you get to the Quentin section. It gets even worse.
I’m not sure, but my recollection is that the other parts aren’t as hard as Benjy’s bit. It’s been a few years, though.
Read reviews of the book rather than the book. If you are concerned the reviews of the book will not be as accurate as the book, or in some sense there is something to the book you won’t get from the reviews I suggest
1) The reviews will tell you why the book is famous, which is probably why you set about reading the book in the first place. The reviews of the book will tell you more efficiently why the book is famous than you could ever expect to gain from reading the book itself. If you determine the the reasons the book is famous are sufficient for you to want to read the book, it will be easier to tolerate your own anger as you read it.
2) On the off chance that the reviews of the book somehow miss the true literary point of the book, there is a vanishingly small probability that you will repair that deficit in your own reading.
3) On the chance that the book is only thought to be good but is not actually good (whatever that means), you will at least know why it was thought to be good, which is ultimately what brought you to the book in the first place.
Just as with anything else modern, modern literature, at least some of it, is written for a small audience made up of the kind of people who like modern literature and read a lot of it. Its like reading a physics paper not being a physics graduate student, or looking at abstract modern art not being an insider on that particular thing.
In that vein: why look at a sunset, when you can have someone describe how they look? Why go on a rollercoaster when you can have someone describe the sensation to you? Hearing a secondhand summary of an aesthetic experience != that experience.
If a review of The Sound And The Fury were as good to read as the book itself, then why would Faulkner bother writing the former instead of the latter? (Then again, I suppose Borges did famously take advantage of that shortcut.)
If you aIf you aIf you If you are reading the book to read it and enjoy it,, yay! The OP said he was reading the book and hating it. and wondering how to understand the book.
When someone asks about solar hydrodynamics do you object to the recommendation of a textbook? Why don’t they just get a telescope and smoky lenses and take the data and derive the theory for themselves?
There is more than one way to understand something. If one is not working, try another.
I guess we have different interpretations of charlemango’s motivation here. I assumed they (“they” because I don’t know his/her gender) were seeking to get some aesthetic enjoyment from the book but were struggling to do so. On the other hand, you state that they are probably reading it to determine why it’s famous. This seems strange to me: I don’t think someone would try reading a book for only this reason. I agree that if that is were indeed someone’s motivation for reading a book, they’d be as well reading the reviews.
Edited to add: there’s some insight in your claim that modernist literature is, in some sense, aimed at an audience of specialists.
The OP may have assumed that the book being famous would therefore also be unusually enjoyable. This might be a bad assumption, or it might be a good assumption, but the book is only unusually enjoyable for people who are properly prepared to read the book with particular bits of historical and/or literary knowledge in place.
That the OP persists in trying to wrest enjoyment from a book which is clearly not giving enjoyment to them suggests that the OP would be best served understanding more about why she thought to pick up this book in the first place. Whether the extra knowledge allows her to enjoy the book, or whether the extra knowledge makes it clearer to her why she will not enjoy the book, given what I know about reading books or seeing movies 50 or 100 years after they are produced, that learning the context will be revealing and valuable in many ways.
So even if the goal is enjoying the book, their best shot is to learn the history, learn why the people who rate this book so highly do so.
Agreed. My only point of disagreement is that this is a sufficient substitute for reading the thing itself, as opposed to a supplement to it. (In my own reply to the OP I suggested looking at a study guide.)
If you can find a decent study guide (online, or, if there’s a physical edition, then secondhand copies of it will doubtless cheaply available on Amazon from students who are done with them), then reading that along with the book isn’t cheating. Reading notes for something which is fiction and therefore ostensibly ‘leisure’ reading may seem a bit absurd, but I think it can perhaps be justified. Aside from anything else, it can supply useful context not otherwise easily available to those not living in early twentieth century America and/or part of the high modern literati.
Whether or not you want to invest that kind of effort over and above what you’re already doing is your call, though.
It is a hard book. I read it when I was a rather high-minded teenager, surely understanding very little of it, but it’s actually a little hard for me to conceive of myself reading something so difficult now.
Build up to it by reading other books by the same author or in the same style. As I Lay Dying is supposed to be easier. Woolf is also stream of consciousness. Henry James is modern but less stream of consciousness. Or you could try his brother, William.
Confirm that As I Lay Dying is indeed easier.