Collage 
 What an extraordinary narrative technique! A series of short chapters, each headed by the name of the speaker--Darl, Cora, Dewey, Tull--written in a language that is sometimes unschooled Southern vernacular, sometimes of a thrillingly inventive sophistication. At first, we do not know who these people are; we may not even know their gender; their relationship to one another is left for us to find out. Not even the time sequence is clear: while the general trend is chronological, individual sections can slip forward or back in time. The same events can also look quite different depending on the speaker. The whole thing is like a collage; only when you put the pieces together do you get to see the picture. 
 And what you get is this. The speakers are members of the Bundren family and their neighbors. Over the course of the novel, they will transport the body of the mother of the family by mule-drawn wagon over flooded rivers and rutted lanes to bury her in her home town of Jackson. Anse, the father, is stubborn and selfish. Cash, the eldest son, is a competent carpenter who builds his mother's coffin outside the window of the room in which she is dying as reassurance that she will be looked after. Darl, the second son, is the principal narrator, with a power of language often indistinguishable from the author's own. Then, after a gap, comes Jewel, their mother's favorite son, but a maverick. Then Dewey Dell, the only girl. And Vardaman, the youngest boy; his combination of naivete and insight serves a similar function to Benjy in The Sound and the Fury, though I cannot tell if this is because he is also retarded or merely very young. 
 Their journey is delayed because the two middle boys are away from home when their mother dies. Almost immediately after that, they face a huge obstacle: one of the river bridges has been washed away in the floods and the next is passable only on foot. Their attempt to take the wagon across by a ford is the first major action sequence in the novel, made more exciting (and, realistically, more confusing) by the use of four separate narrators. Meanwhile, we are learning more about the individual characters, their personalities, their back-stories, and in more than one case, their private reasons for needing to get to Jackson. Although the occasion is a sad one, and some of the personal drama is as serious as anything in Faulkner, overall this novel is a comedy, realist in outlook and gently ironic in tone. 
 But above all, it is Faulkner's language that keeps one reading. I want to end with an extended passage from one of Vardaman's chapters: the first paragraph in his own voice, the second an example of the vernacular dialogue throughout, and the third, about a horse in a stable, an extraordinary shift into a kind of language that is beyond any of the characters in the novel, let alone this simple child: 
 I am not crying now. I am not anything. Dewey Dell comes to the hill and calls me. Vardaman. I am not anything. I am quiet. You, Vardaman. I can cry quiet now, feeling and hearing my tears. 
 "Then hit want. Hit hadn't happened then. Hit was a-layin right there on the ground. And now she's gittin ready to cook hit." 
 It is dark. I can hear wood, silence: I know them. But not living sounds, not even him. It is as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity, into an unrelated scattering of components--stuffings and stampings; smells of cooling flesh and ammoniac hair; an illusion of a coordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones within which, detached and secret and familiar, an 'is' different from my 'is.'