Why does everyone treat the Sound and the Fury like it's Faulkner's masterpiece? Absalom, Absalom! is so much better.
most people read sound and the fury and stop reading faulkner, content with themselves now that they've read what is known to be a literary masterpiece. it is their first and last faulkner novel.
>>24829151Why don't they read As I Lay Dying, then? It's shorter and easier, but just as good.
it's very obviously harder to read.as i lay dying is obviously hard for normies, sound and the fury is harder still, and absalom, absalom! is obviously much harder even more. if, having read it, you are unaware that it is hard to parse for anyone but the most dedicated you are probably some level of autistic
>>24829171Why is it hard?
>>24829171But normalfags praise shit like Ulysses.
>>24829333You don't know what normalfags are, or what shit is. You should have stayed in school.
>>24829189Unreliable narrator + stream of consciousness and achronological order
>>24829358kill yourself
The Sound and the Fury moved me more.More emotionally devastating
>>24829144It's atrociously unedited, and it makes you appreciate the absolute horror of having to pare down SARTORIS from Flags in the Dust's manuscript. There's gold there and a good story, it's just a question of how much bullshit you can tolerate. >>24829424Many unreliable narrators trying to save face about things everyone would rather forget. Sutpen - a Dutch surname - was the source of black ancestral taint, not his first wife
Most people who start Absalom Absalom end up like that gambling meme with the diamonds. It gets messy in the second act and I can see most people who start it dropping it. Benjy in sound and fury is hard to follow but he's not the only POV we follow the whole family. Absalom Absalom jumps around from quinten to quinten's dad to some old biddy to her lawyer, it's all over the place. Instead of learning about this family first hand it's all second and third person accounts 60 years later.But the third act is still better than anything in sound and fury or as I lay dying, once it got to quinten and his roommate reading the letter I don't think I put the book down till I had finished it.
>>24829144>Why does everyone treat the Sound and the Fury like it's Faulkner's masterpiece? Absalom, Absalom! is so much better.Faulkner didn't think so. He was a S&F man.>Well Faulkner wasn't necessarily the best judge of his own —<Pulls out Colt Python, cocks it, aims at OP's head> Are you one of those ‘Death of the Author’ lunatics?> . . . No.Good. <Puts gun away> Anyway, to answer your question, Absalom, Absalom! has no characters we actually give a damn about. The Sound and the Fury has Caddy Compson, who is a 24-carat sweetheart. Therefore TSatF is better.
>>24830022>He was a S&F man.Sauce?
>>24830022>Absalom, Absalom! has no characters we actually give a damn aboutSutpen was kino af, what are you talking about?>Caddy Compson, who is a 24-carat sweetheart. She was a slut and a bitch.
>tfw no mutant miscegenation giant mutt son to carry me aroundthat was onna them uh, metaphors right?
>>24829144The Sound and the Fury is a truly original work in the history of American literature; it is truly far-sighted and wide-ranging. Absalom, Absalom! is a great book written in a complex, engaging style, but at its core, it is simply Faulkner's attempt to match Moby-Dick.
>>24830307>it is simply Faulkner's attempt to match Moby-Dick.That's what makes it so good. He was standing on the shoulders of a giant.
>>24829171Okay, but is there any reason why McCarthy preferred TSATF over AA? Especially since his own writing style is like Absalom and not like the other, and Judge Holden is clearly copied from Thomas Sutpen.
>>24830316are you not able to think for yourself?
>>24829333nobody ever read ulysses
>>24830514brainlet projection.
>>24830285https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGllxaAlG7Y
>>24830496kill yourself
>>24830803This is so interesting to hear. Even after his growth as a writer, I can see why he would love that one the most. It was the beginning of his own style and it was the biggest effort for him to accomplish, the longest and the hardest, as he put it.
>>24830316>Okay, but is there any reason why McCarthy preferred TSATF over AA?Because it's better. It has more passion. It was the closest to Faulkner's heart and you can tell. In comparison, A,A! is factitious, even self-conscious. It's WF setting out to write the Great American Novel (or at least the Great Civil War Novel).>Especially since his own writing style is like Absalom and not like the otherCM 's style isn't very much like either book, although I suppose if you had to pick, he's somewhat closer to A,A!. But that's irrelevant. Writers don't necessarily like or admire more those books which are more like their own.>and Judge Holden is clearly copied from Thomas Sutpen.No CM character is anything like Thomas Sutpen and no WF character is anything like Judge Holden.Read the prefaces Faulkner wrote to later editions of TSatF. He constantly repeats: this was the book that was most *him*; Caddy was the character he loved the most. Everything he wrote after that was a disappointment to him; he never again recaptured that creative ecstasy. AILD he wrote "coldly", just to impress people (after TSatF flopped). He knew it was great but he didn't *love* it. He waited two years then wrote LIA. Again, he knew it was good, but he just found he didn't care about it:—. . . I received a copy of the printed book and I found that I didn’t even want to see what kind of jacket Smith had put on it. [...] I believed that I knew then why I had not recaptured that first ecstasy, and that I should never again recapture it; that whatever novels I should write in the future would be written without reluctance, but also without anticipation of joy: that in The Sound and the Fury I had already put perhaps the only thing in literature which would ever move me very much: Caddy climbing the pear tree to look in the window at her grandmother’s funeral while Quentin and Jason and Benjy and the negroes looked up at the muddy seat of her drawers.— Preface, The Sound and the Fury, 1946 edition
>>24830943>No CM character is anything like Thomas Sutpen and no WF character is anything like Judge Holden.This was going too far perhaps. If you really want a CM character who is like Thomas Sutpen, then Glanton from Blood Meridian is a *bit* like him in some ways. But the Judge is nothing remotely like him.
