Yeah. When my daughter was two years old I was reading this book and she asked me to read it to her. I figured she'd lose interest after a minute, but an hour later she was still listening. Of course she didn't get the words or story, but she was, I'm guessing, held rapt by the flow of the prose, which is really unlike anything I've read.
> Tentatively, it seems to dramatize the fragmentation of historical
> understanding, the way it comes to us in bits & pieces and we struggle to
> put it together. With all due respect to a very great novel, War and Peace,
> Faulkner understands historical knowledge better than Tolstoi did -- he (or
> his narrator) was much too confident that he had grasped "history" as it
> "really was." Faulkner sees the flimsiness of that.
I think this is exactly right. Even Shreve's attempt to give it a narrative coherence is frustrated and he can only accuse Quentin of hating the South; his way of making sense of it is to personalize and to erase the complex of narrations and their political/social forces in favor of a moral or individual psychology. But Faulkner jumbles all those things together and makes it difficult to distinguish historical fact from historical memory. I think each of the narrators is supposed to represent specific historical vantage points and political assemblages, but they are not easily separable and there's no objective "truth" to be discerned.
"He ceased [narrating] again. It was just as well, since he had no listener. Perhaps he was aware of it. Then suddenly he had no talker either, though possibly he was not aware of this. Because now neither of them was there. They were both in Carolina and the time was forty-six years ago, and it was not even four now, but compounded still further, since now both of them were Henry Sutpen and both of them were Bon, compounded each of both, yet either neither, smelling the very smoke which had blown and faded away forty-six years ago...."