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and most of his characters are southerners who, to one degree or another, are struggling with life in a country that has experienced defeat, resisting change, and dealing with a lingering nostalgia for a time that many of them never knew. Faulkner’s South is, of course, a segregated South, and most of his characters are white southerners, many of whom have not and will not accept the reality of racial equality. Faulkner himself became involved in the early Civil Rights struggle, but being a southerner who rarely left the small Mississippi college town where he grew up, he understood the difficulty of the racial divide, and in his writing we can find some of the most subtle explanations of the difficult relationship between blacks and white, as well as some of the most horrifying descriptions of the effects of racial hatred.

But if Faulkner were only concerned with the lives of southerners in the long period after the Civil War and into the first half of the twentieth century, his writing would not have the appeal it does (and he might not have received the Nobel Prize for Literature). Faulkner deals with universal themes, and his characters, speaking in their own, sometimes barely articulate, sometimes profoundly insightful voices, express the fears, joys, and confusion of struggling with life: the voices of the Bundren family and their neighbors and acquaintances alternating in As I Lay Dying lend the narrative much more power than a simple telling of the plot would. Allowing the “idiot” Benjy to narrate the first section of The Sound and the Fury, in which time is confused and details accumulate slowly, makes the reader consider how events are interpreted and what the mind makes of memories. In Light in August, Joe Christmas never knows his true origins, but his assumptions, and the beliefs of others, lead to a dramatic portrayal of the effects of prejudice.

Often tragic, sometimes absurdly comic, Faulkner’s plots are frequently driven by forces that cannot be controlled by his characters: the definition of classic tragedy. In As I Lay Dying, the family set off on a journey to fulfill the dying wish of Addie Bundren, only to be stymied by an almost biblical series of events: fire and flood among them. Benjy, Quentin, and Jason Compton in The Sound and the Fury are each affected by something that happened to their sister, which they could not or did not prevent, and perhaps by the effects of history itself. In Light in August, the lives of two characters who never meet, Lena Grove and Joe Christmas, lead to both horrifying tragedy and a small but significant ray of hope.

So, how do we approach Faulkner? We approach him through his language, letting ourselves hear the poetry in it, stopping to savor a phrase (or look up an unfamiliar word!), or just reading until the sound becomes familiar. We approach him through his characters, hating them or loving them, fearing for them, hoping for them or merely wondering how they survive. We approach him through the stories he tells, because they are familiar or strange, because they sound like history or myth or just a good tale. We can even approach him through what we know about Faulkner’s own life and times or through what we read in the newspaper every day or what we have experienced in our personal lives. If the definition of classic literature is that it concerns things that we continue to want (and need) to read about, then we can simply read Faulkner.

Text © 2005 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., a division of Random House, Inc., New York