Intruder in the Dust

This is a simple murder mystery plot, if in some places a little convoluted, and Faulkner presents it in his (at times) infuriating manner of stream of conscience not quite telling you what's happening but what's being seen. Even to the point of not telling you who "he" is at the beginning of the novel (it's Chick - spoiler).Faulkner makes a lot of good points in the narrative about race relations and the South and the counter-productive interference of 'outsiders' (non-Southerners) even while allowing we're all one country. He also conveys the tenuous position all blacks lived under and Lucas' (the accuse black man) way of bucking against that as a man with some dignity and self worth. The novel's weakness is that all of this can easily be lost in paragraphs of narrative that run on for pages, often (not sometimes) or even enverably in a single sentence. This carries over into some of Gavin Steven's speeches (complete with parenthetical asides that read much like the narrative and nothing at all like people talk.Though not in first person we see everything from the "he" - Chick, Gavin's nephew, and his motivation in helping Lucas goes back four years previously when Lucas helped him and subsequently refused repeated payback. It seems that the problem that Chick had might have been that of beholding to a Negro, even as he struggled with (and his uncle tells him more than once 'Don't stop') the relative positions and freedom of white and black.A casual unremarked upon scene illustrates this perfectly. Several of the characters are sitting down to eat breakfast and they all go into the dining room, except for Aleck (who is Chick's friend and or but black) sits down in the kitchen to eat. On the one hand a white mad made him those eggs but on the other he's not eating with him. It's just not done.More obvious is that when Lucas is arrested and faces a possible (or likely) lynching but for the sheriff there isn't a single Negro to be found on the street, field, or school. If something like that, or even not like that, happened today people would feel fairly safe to flood the streets in protest or make their presence known standing up for justice. What Faulkner conveys here without showing us a single person is the fear. I kept thinking what it would have felt like to be a black man with a family looking to you and you can't even go outside. To me this was a very powerful part of the novel.All in all a difficult read. I had a harder time with this than the previous four I've read recently or any of the major novels I've read over the years. So I don't rate this one as high compared to the other novels but I still think this was a worthwhile read, an important book. I just wouldn't recommend starting here.

I recently reread Intruder in the Dust after many years, and while I always thought it was a really good Faulkner novel, now I think it's just about in the highest rank, almost on the order of The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! It's very gripping, moves at the pace of a thriller, but is just as complicated and full of insight as the absolutely best Faulkner (and I consider Faulkner to be one of the three greatest American novelists, along with Melville and Henry James). I also just saw the 1949 Clarence Brown movie made from the novel, and I think it's very much worth seeing; in some ways, in terms of moments of plot, bits of dialogue, other details, it follows the novel very closely; in other ways it makes some real simplifications, both in terms of plot and, more importantly, in terms of character, tone, and most importantly the critique of Southern racism, of which the novel, not surprisingly, has a much more nuanced account. But the film is a powerful account of the possibilities and limitations of adapting a novel into film.

I had read most of Faulkner's oeuvre but somehow missed this one until now.. The story - a tale of race relations in a small Southern town that's an evident precursor to "To Kill a Mockingbird" - is short and pretty simple, yet by the end derails the expectations the reader goes in with in several ways -- the outcome, the perpetrator of the crime involved, the attitudes of whites to blacks, among others. Interesting too is the proffered philosophy of racism in the U.S. South - it can/will be solved, but the solution must develop organically, has to come from within the southern conscious and mores, and cannot effectively be imposed by well-meaning "outsiders."

This is on the surface a story of a black man in he 1950's who is wrongly accused of murdering a white man. There is a lot of cumbersome verbiage. On the other hand Faulkner can move you. You can see the court house, the town square and feel the tension as two teenage boys and a 70 year old woman dig up a body to save an innocent life. The threesome travel a dark dusty road at night and have to hide as someone passes by in the middle of the night. You feel your heart racing and your mind jumping ahead as to what's next.

"Intruder in the Dust" is another of the many faces (or facets) of William Faulkner. It's a fascinating tale of the efforts of two boys (one white, one black) to save the life of a Mississippi black man accused of shooting a white man in the back. The writing includes some of Faulkner's interesting---and to some readers, maddening---techniques of writing, including motives, thoughts, scenes described in the negative (what they are not) and the use of multiple nearly synonymous verbs side by side, as if he couldn't make up his mind which to use. While that may be true, I prefer to see it as his attempt to find the most precise nuance to given actions in which a single word doesn't quite "get it."

One of my Faulkner favorites. I bought it for a grandson. It has a challenging beginning to the story because the author does not tell the reader who he is speaking about until the end of the first chapter. He merely refers to him as "he." So, a reader will think he has missed something and keeps rereading. Typical of Faulkner who never minded that his readers may be perplexed.

I'm just going to go ahead and say that this is an excellent book (one of Faulkner's finest), but it requires a different kind of reading than most readers (even of Faulkner) are accustomed to deploying. Let me also add that, in order to get the novel's whole meaning, the reader may very well end-up taking a year: no joke. Nevertheless, the reward is beyond worthwhile--trust me. Like I said, one of Faulkner's finest.

This is incredibly difficult reading. I had to stop often and re visit the same page or chapter. But despite that, it is brilliant. Just takes time. I had tried to read this when I was much younger, but lacked the staying power.

Haven't read this book yet, but i already know I will love it!

Quite difficult to read, but the work of entering into the central character's mind is repaid.The plot, while at times gripping, is secondary to the atmosphere of the hot ( and heated ) South.A book to recall and revisit.

So far so good, but not finished it yet

Rather heavy reading but well worth the effort

The main story in this novel involves a black man called Lucas Beauchamp who is wrongly accused of the murder of a white man. The story is told through the eyes of Charles Mallison, a sixteen-year-old who Beauchamp rescued from drowning four years earlier. Charles sets out to prove that Beauchamp did not fire the fatal shot and must prove this before a mob breaks into the jail-house and lynches Beauchamp. Together with his friend Aleck and Miss Habersham, an elderly spinster they go on a mission to exhume the body of the murdered man- and make an unexpected discovery.The above sounds like the plot of a thriller and indeed there are thrilling almost noir-ish elements which Faulkner uses to explore race relations in the south (and boy does Faulkner sometimes bash his message on the heads of the reader.)This was my first Faulkner novel and it was not nearly as difficult as I imagined it would be, I struggled far more with reading Sam Bellow than I did with this one. Yes the writing is unusual (stream of consciousness involving page long sentences for a start) but I was able to easily let myself flow with the prose and see where it took me.I enjoyed lots about this novel, the plot is a great one, the characters well drawn and the sense of the South as a place and culture are very prominent. While this is not considered to be Faulkner's best (and I didn't particularly like some of the preachy aspects in this novel) I look forward to reading more of his work.