Friday, January 8, 2010

Of place, time, fortune, do cohere and jump

I’ve put a good dent in Light in August but it isn’t going as quickly as I’d like. The story, at times, seems interesting, and the same goes for the characters. However, and I’ve confirmed this through some secondary reading, Faulkner likes to jump around in time, so the book isn’t told in chronological order. At times I think this can work, like in ‘Pulp Fiction,’ but I’m finding it’s causing some problems for me here.

Every time the story starts to build some momentum, I find it gets derailed by one of these shifts. All the sudden, Faulkner is writing about different characters in a different time and a different place. I also found out through a little research that I’m not the only one who finds this technique a little confusing. Apparently, this is one of Faulkner’s least confusing works. That kind of scares me for his other book on the list. Will it be more confusing? Maybe I’ll be smarter by then because of all the reading I’ve done.

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