A Fable, William Faulkner

Faulkner is starting to grow on me like unfamiliar music that gets better each time you hear it. It’s unbelievable that A Fable didn’t get the kind of attention it deserved when it was released in 1954. Although it won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, it was panned by critics across the board (is this only possible in literature?). A dark allegory to The Passion of Christ, its setting in the trenches of World War 1 was probably unsettling to the vast majority of its (Christian) readers. But don’t be fooled; Faulker spent 9 years writing it, and some of the passages in here are as starkly powerful insights on the human condition as have ever been written. You can tell he was trying to write the capstone of his career, a career that as profound as it was couldn’t settle for less than divine testimony. A talent such as his gone through life without a perspective on religion or escaping the south just wasn’t meant to be. Many of his fans dismissed the novel because of its unfamiliar setting, but aren’t writers supposed to push the envelope and explore new territory? That’s what writing is. Whenever I’m writing I carefully make sure I’m not repeating myself; and it’s easy because I only get the drive to write when it’s about something I haven’t explored before.  A Fable faced a lot of scrutiny for all the wrong reasons, and it’s unfortunate that it’s not recognized among Faulkner’s better known works. 

 

My interpretation of the ending (SPOILER ALERT): The last part at the General's funeral might have confused a lot of people. I think The Runner was the guy on the ground and the Quartermaster was the man above him weeping. The Runner represents the influence of the Corporal, who in turn represents Jesus, while the Quartermaster represents the influence of the General, who in turn represents God. To me the most powerful part of the book was the General's monologue to the Corporal before he sentenced him to death: 'forsakes' him, if you will. It was as if God, the Father (and he was biologically his father in the novel), had been talking down to his naive, rebellious son, bargaining with him and demanding conservatism. Maybe this was what turned off a lot of Christians; Jesus and God were on the same side in The Bible, but in A Fable God is depicted as a merciless tyrant holding up the infrastructure of a war driven society. It might be safer to say that this is not an allegory but an allegoric interpretation of The Passion. Anyways, in the last scene we see there is a reconciliation between the two men, which suggests that God and his son finally came to terms even though it happened post-mortem through different people.