![]() ![]() From the first line, the reader is pitched into the deep south: “Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file… anyone watching us from the cotton-house can see Jewel’s frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own.” Welcome to a brutal, backwoods community of impoverished cotton farmers in 1920s Mississippi.Īddie’s dying wish is to be buried among her own people, “a hard day’s ride” away. ![]() The Bundren family’s demanding stream-of-consciousness narrative (Faulkner was a modernist pioneer) is intercut with the voices of the local doctor and preacher, together with neighbours and friends. The death and burial of a southern matriarch, Addie Bundren, is told from some 15 viewpoints, including that of the dying woman herself. Apart from Mark Twain ( No 23 in this series), no other American writer before Faulkner had ever immersed his readers so completely in the vernacular language and culture of a society that was, and perhaps still is, so deeply foreign to mainstream American experience. It was his ambition, he said, after the comparative failure of The Sound and the Fury, “deliberately to write a tour de force”. ![]() T his is the first, and probably the most popular, of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County stories, a short, dark and compelling novel set in what he called “my apocryphal county”, a fictional rendering of Lafayette County in his native Mississippi. ![]()
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