Difficulty Reading Faulkner

Difficulty Reading The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

I chose to read some William Faulkner for my difficulty reading because I have heard that he is a difficult read.  I’ve never read any of his novels before.  However, I did pick up As I Lay Dying once and did a little pre-reading of it, but never bought the book or continued.  I thought The Sound and the Fury may be a good text for this assignment so I picked it up at Aardvark books and just started reading. It was hard for me to just dive in because I always like to do a little pre-reading first.  I read the first ten pages of the novel and I would have to say one of the difficulties I was having was the large number of characters being introduced and then the quick time shifts where as a reader I couldn’t tell which characters were in the scene at any given moment.  One reason I think I was having difficulty was because I couldn’t figure out what was happening right from the start.  The author was using the pronoun ‘they’ without introducing who ‘they’ were.  And this ‘they’ were hitting something which gave me the impression they were playing golf.  I used to bartend on a golf course so my golf repertoire helped me a little here if I was correct in my assumption, but I could have been wrong because the author mentioned a caddie which later turned out to be one of the characters names.  There were also moments when the text would become italicized and a character named Luster was mentioned.  Luster seemed to be scolding the narrator and then the author would shift back to un-italicized text and there would be different characters introduced.  It was also hard to figure out what was going on with the main character.  All of the other characters seemed to be treating him like a dog or a child. I also think I was having difficulty with the language of the text.  The characters seemed to be speaking in what seemed like a southern dialect that I am not familiar with.  I noticed that one thing I do when I have a hard time with a text is go back and re-read passages. If I had begun to read this text on my own I would definitely go back and do some pre-reading.  I would read the back of the book and try to get a sense of the main characters.  I would read the authors biography to see if I could gain a little insight to the historical repertoire of the text.  Maybe I would annotate the text by highlighting the characters names so I could keep track.  I know this would continue to be a difficult text to read because looking forward I noticed that the first chapter is 75 pages and the story didn’t seem to be going anywhere in the first 10 pages I had read.  I usually have a hard time putting down a book once I begin.  If it is difficult I just try to read through my difficulties.  I’m sure that is what I would do with this text if I had time to read it.