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July 5, 2012 | 12:41
pm
Although William Faulkner won a Nobel Prize in literature, his writing is still considered particularly dense. One of his most difficult works is The Sound and the Fury, which is told from multiple points of view. It begins in the voice of Benjy, a mentally disabled man whose perception is jumbled, immediate and distinctly hard to parse.
One of the reasons Benji s narrative is hard to follow is because it jumps around in time with little indication of the change, other than italics. But when Faulkner was working on the book in the 1920s The Sound and the Fury was published in 1929 he imagined a way to make the section clearer to readers. I wish publishing was advanced enough to use colored ink, Faulkner wrote to his editor, as I argued with you and Hal in the Speakeasy that day.