William Faulkner does not make things easy for his readers. Time slips without warning, narrators contradict one another, sentences stretch across pages, and crucial information often arrives long after the moment when we first needed it. For readers trained to expect clarity and momentum, his fiction can initially feel hostile. Yet on Faulkner’s birthday, September 25, it is worth remembering that the difficulty was never simply decoration. His most demanding novels reward precisely the kind of patient reading they appear to resist.
