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A Fable by William Faulkner - 3* - My Review

Published in 1954, A Fable is not your typical Faulkner novel. It is set during the Great War in France and follows a Corporal who starts a mutiny by convincing his regiment to refuse to attack the enemy. This act of defiance spreads to other units, creating a ceasefire along the Western Front. The book is historical fiction, an allegorical retelling of the story of Christ's passion, and an anti-war narrative. The Corporal, accompanied by twelve followers, is arrested and brought before military authorities. One of the dramatic scenes involves a dialogue between the Corporal and the top military officer, who offers him a chance to escape execution if he renounces his pacifist stance.

Faulkner employs his usual complex narrative style filled with dense prose and lengthy sentences. The novel shifts between different viewpoints and moves backward and forward in time. It explores whether personal acts of moral courage can serve as effective challenges to systems of oppression. The work also examines faith and doubt. I found it a rather demanding mental task. For me, it seems overly complex, overly long, and overly repetitive. The novel won Faulkner his second Pulitzer Prize, but I did not enjoy it as much as many of his other books. My favorites are Light in August and As I Lay Dying.

“For six thousand years we labored under the delusion that the only way to stop a war was to get together more regiments and battalions than the enemy could, or vice versa, and hurl them upon each other until one lot was destroyed and, the one having nothing left to fight with, the other could stop fighting. We were wrong, because yesterday morning, by simply declining to make an attack, one single French regiment stopped us all.”