I'm about 1/5th of the way in and I'm bored to tears. Does this get even vaguely interesting at any point?

I meant to say The Sound and the Fury. both novels are good

>lit isnt difficult
Everyone is laughing at you, i just want you to know

This. Only severe brainlets think that reading fiction make you smarter.

>and you're an idiot
nice argument.

>jewish
Not sure if this is some of the most concise bait ive ever seen, or youre just another migrant

a bunch of malformed, feeble minded pseuds are figuratively laughing at me for speaking the truth about their pet hobby they’ve loaded all their cognitivte abilities into? oh dear oh me oh my, what will i do? oh that’s right ill go do anything else other than reading dead words. faggot

The Sound and the Fury is one of the most unpleasant reading experiences I've ever had and if you say you enjoyed it, you're probably lying to yourself.

t. pseud

>reading fiction makes you smarter
Non sequiter: the post

its my opinion. im not debating whether or not its true or asking you to agree with me

Do me a favor and explain, in your own words, the metaphysical meaning of this excerpt from AILD (an easy book which your 110 IQ mind is apparently not struggling with)

>In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is not. Beyond the unlamped wall I can hear the rain shaping the wagon that is ours, the load that is no longer theirs that felled and sawed it nor yet theirs that bought it and which is not ours either, lie on our wagon though it does, since only the wind and the rain shape it only to Jewel and me, that are not asleep. And since sleep is is-not and rain and wind are was, it is not. Yet the wagon is, because when the wagon is was, Addie Bundren will not be. And Jewel is, so Addie Bundren must be. And then I must be, or I could not empty myself for sleep in a strange room. And so if I am not emptied yet, I am is.

>How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.

It's true though. Jewish (((intellectuals))) pushed modernism because they wanted to end the beauty of romanticism and push novels and writers who only promote the ugly side of humanity.
The only thing they know how to do is destroy beautiful things.

I wish i had that jpg of baitkake but im too lazy rn

(Im deeply worried that these people actually arent baiting tho plz kill us all now)

Genuinely one of the funniest books I’ve read.

>beauty of romanticism
Oh boy someone hasn't made it out of high school yet

I managed to make my way through V. about a week ago and that held my attention throughout. I wouldn't say that I'm afraid of dense or complex prose.

I haven't read any other Faulkner. Maybe this was the wrong place to start?

Maybe one of you could expound upon the deeper meaning here that I'm failing to grasp.

That is meaningless drivel. And if you are spending any brain cells on trying to analyze its meaning, then I don't know what to tell you.

There are lots of great writers who are able to express deep concepts in their writing. Faulkner was absolutely not one of them.

>metaphysical meaning
Who said anything about metaphysics in this thread? I really hope you do not read fiction for philosophical understanding. That's a really bad habit to get into.

>This is meaningless drivel
Kind of like everything you've contributed to this thread

user certainly never read Absalom! Absalom!

Good one.

The passage directly addresses key concepts in Western metaphysical philosophy. I guess you missed that

Since both of you have demonstrated that you are intellectually incapable of analyzing this very easy and simple passage from AILD, I going to go ahead and tell you that you should not be reading Faulkner. You are simply not intelligent enough to be discussing literature of this caliber, and when you open your mouths on the subject you can only poison and degenerate the discussion since you have nothing to contribute.

Again: please do NOT read Faulkner! Please do NOT read difficult books if you know your brain is too inferior to properly process them! Not just for your sake, but also for that of others, especially the people who have to clean up after your intellectual failures

It gets pretty damn interesting round about the point that you educate yourself and stop being a gigantic pleb

>imagine actually believing this

Faulkner himself basically admitted that most of his novels were potboilers to pay the bills.
AILD specifically he even said he wrote in about 3 weeks.

It's like you're trying so hard but not realizing how misguided you are right from the start. I don't give a shit about the passage. I haven't even looked at it. I liked the book, I have a developed interpretation of it, and I'm not going to spoonfeed it to you because you have proved throughout this thread that you fundamentally fail to realize what I am saying. Pray tell, why would I give two shits about what corncob has to say philosophically? I don't read literature for philosophy. I read philosophy for philosophy.

The fact that you do either means A. You're dumb B. You're are still in high school or C. Some combination of the two.

Please, enlighten us with your take on the meaning of the book.

Calling people simpletons is good fun, but no one in this thread has provided anything but an ill-defined shell of an explanation. Just a couple of sentences.

Nice try, the only novel he said that about is Sanctuary

His genius for intuition and the speed with which he wrote AILD doesn't subtract from its remarkable beauty and intelligence. If anything it lends it a certain propulsion that it might not have otherwise

I'm sorry that you failed with such a popular and well-known book, but not all minds were built for higher cognitive thought. Accept your failure with grace and put your energies towards other purposes. There's plenty of other hobbies for people who are stupid, I'm sure. Kite flying, cooking, model trains. You'll find something. But yes, literature is not for you

I personally enjoyed it for the humor in this otherwise dark story.

Y'all can have your opinions.
>I don't begrudge you for it.

Faulkner is actually a very easy read. OP said nothing of its difficulty but spoke only of its boringness.

That white guilt thing wasn't bait. Read The Sound and the Fury. The whole book is about the dissolution of the old white power structure (exemplified through Quentin, who kills himself, and his siblings) and the promotion of the black race (exemplified through Dilsey) as the new torchbearers of society. Faulkner himself even said that Dilsey was his favorite character. That book is the prototype of feeling bad for being white.

No, because you're a big dumbo

>no one in this thread had provided anything
I've provided of a case example of how you are stupid, not to mention a casual opinion and a list of characters to go analyze. Yet again, you're just trying so hard.

>calling people simpletons is good fun
Yes it is. That is why I'll continue. Also,
> simpletons
Are you this autistic in real life?

Why buy into that interpratation tho? You could just as well spend the energy on developing another reading (I know because the secondary literature is vast, though underdeveloped imo) and not contribute to your paranoia about white guilt.

The problem is that I don't think I'm being paranoid. This seems like a very reasonable interpretation. One of the main themes is all his books is how bad white people in the south suck, while black people are better at everything, especially at being Christians. He thought the future of the church was in black people, and not in white.

Whether he is right about that is unimportant to me, the reason it bothers me is because it's very self-loathing.

That said, if one's goal was to look at other themes in the text I wouldn't fault them for reading Faulkner. I'm just saying for me that particular white guilt strain in his literature is highly problematic and frankly, uninteresting.

>I don't give a shit about the passage. I haven't even looked at it
Then maybe you shouldn't reply to a post asking you to interpret it, you gigantic retard

The point of my posts is not to explain why the book is good or what it "means." You can read ten thousand interpretations and analyses on jstor, or just pick up an anthology of Faulkner criticism at your local library if you're actually curious (I doubt you are). The point of my posts is to explain why the other users are unintelligent people who shouldn't be discussing this particular book.

>big dumbo

Are you this autistic in real life?

Your insecurity is seeping through the screen.

I guess I'll finish reading it and come to my own conclusion. I shouldn't have expected anything other than people berating each other for their opinions.

Fair enough. I see how a macro reading like that can hold, though I guess I see it more as a means to the ends of developing psychologically rich characters than some political bent. I have to admit, the older i get, the less interesting the whole "curse of the south dust swirrling muh wisteria vines" stuff is. More interested in the naturalistic stuff nowadays (The Bear, in particular).

I can reply to whatever I want to faggot. I was replying to your own shitty interpretation of it, mostly, to point out how shitty it is.

You're doing it again. And don't pretend like you expected more. You're apart of the problem, dumbo. Go read some literary theory and then try to do interprative work before I have to wipe the floor with your ass again.

Yeah, I'm with you there. I notice how people portray the south as a rank, twisted and perverted place filled with dumb lunatics and raving Christians (see Deliverance or something like that) and it kind of irks me. It feels like people are still trying to inadvertently punish the reputation of south over slavery. And Faulkner in my eyes was one of those guys who started that, which is why he is a hero in the eyes of many left-leaning people.

Despite its meaning, this reads horribly. No pace, feeling of rhythm, no melody in his prose. Not just in this excerpt, which is meant to be choppy, but in all of his work that I've tried. Yes, I get his experimentation with style as an intuitive expression of thought, but I don't like reading it. It's frankly too ugly to waste my time on; even if it would contain profound wisdom, which in all honesty I doubt

>he can't understand Faulkner

find a new hobby

Try Barn Burning. If you don't fuck with that, then you don't fuck with Faulkner for better or worse.

I think it's unwise for people to start with his novels. Most of them (except a few of the really early ones, maybe Light in august, and a few of the really later ones) rely on formal quirks that make sense later on but might immediately seem jarring or tedious.

You're judging a book that takes two days to be read at the 20% mark. Maybe continue reading for another hour or so. Trying to figure out Darl and his actions requires a lot of effort and close reading so maybe you're missing some stuff. Faulkner's aesthetic is usually good enough for me to keep reading despite its drifts into syntactical incoherence. But his ability to portray fear, emotional tension, and human stupidity is quite impressive.

>tfw the sound and the fury was the book that got me into reading outside of genre fiction

The 'point' of the book is to contrast every character's complex dealings with mortality and ontology.

Darl is intelligent, but severely fucked in the head. This line
> And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not.
Is a precursor to Darl's eventual mental breakdown. He has no conception of self. He defines himself entirely in relation to his surroundings and the things he sees (that are both around him and in other places--he narrates events that he is not present for, suggesting the fact that he is clairovoyant or otherwise making scenes up and describing them to the reader).

This theme of Darl is echoed in the later line
>Beyond the unlamped wall I can hear the rain shaping the wagon that is ours

Notice the weird way he describes the scene he cannot see. The rain shaping the wagon? (The outside force is shaping the object). Mostly humans think of it the other way: the wagon stands in the rain.

Does that make sense? Darl has no sense of self, no sense of past, present or future. He cannot grasp a version of himself that exists when he is not conscious. Later in the book, he cannot grasp the idea of death for this same reason. Much of Darl's sections are him trying to logically grasp with the fact of death despite his crippling incapability to grasp the fact that a person can be alive on second and dead the next, or that a thing that happened in the past may not still exist in the present.

Jewell is not intelligent but has a great sense of self.
>Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not.
Translated: Jewell knows he exists simply because he is too simple to consider that fact. Jewell is ontologically certain-- he has no problem getting over his mother's death.

Vardaman also gets over the death eventually by realizing his mother is a fish (She is alive one second--then meat the next).

I love Faulkner in the least pretentious way possible. Yes, he is intentionally obscurantian at times but if you went into Faulkner expecting something easy you deserve to fail. Proper understanding of Faulkner's golden era texts (S&F through Absalom, Absalom) is unfathomably rewarding and will greatly expand what you thought was possible within the limitations of fiction.

I'm sure I did a horrible job explaining. I'm on my second beer and I'm tired, but I promise you everything in AILD exists for a reason. There's not a single gratuitous word in the book and if you take the time and effort your end understanding will be of something both profound and startlingly beautiful (and sad).

Darl and Vardaman's internal monologues are very logical--despite their mental handicaps their sections read like extended syllogisms and logical proofs. Read them as such.

It's shit book, it all boils down to a meager punchilne about how the dad was an asshole.

I didn't enjoy it particular but I admired it

Give up. Faulkner is a third rate charlatan.

So was your father, but you never gave up on him, did you?

havent read it since highschool but i remember liking it a lot OP

honestly how the hell is anyone supposed to figure that out without being an English major or something? Maybe as a philosophy and math guy I'm too straightforward or something, or just possibly too mediocre, but that just seems so obscure.

>philosophy
If you're OP, you're doing really poorly with one of those, as evidenced in this thread.

Love it when user comes through and shows that OP is, in fact, retarded

You seem like an expert. P'ease tell me how to Sound and the Fury.

You basically have to set the book out like a corpse for an autopsy. You don't come to learn that stuff just by doing a single reading cover to cover.