Pylon by William Faulkner
Published 1935 · 285 pages · 65,000 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Pylon to read?
Pylon scores 45 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 62 out of 100
- Faulknerian prose mixed with aviation terminology and Mardi Gras atmosphere.
- Sentence structure: 70 out of 100
- Accelerating, piling sentences that mimic the speed of air races, dense and difficult to parse.
- Abstraction: 45 out of 100
- Existential themes of rootlessness and mortality emerge from the specific milieu rather than explicit philosophizing.
- Information density: 48 out of 100
- Compressed narrative covering a few days with layered social observation and aviation detail.
- Narrative indirection: 42 out of 100
- The Reporter's increasingly unreliable perspective and Faulkner's oblique prose obscure events that a conventional novel would state plainly.
- Symbolic density: 45 out of 100
- The airplane, the airport, Mardi Gras, and the unnamed Reporter all carry symbolic freight about modernity and anonymity.
- Ironic distance: 42 out of 100
- The gap between the Reporter's romantic vision of the barnstormers and their indifference to him creates sustained irony.
- Resolution withholding: 35 out of 100
- Shumann's death resolves the plot but the Reporter's fate and Laverne's future remain deliberately uncertain.
- Structural complexity: 38 out of 100
- Compressed timeframe with a single focal character, though Faulkner's oblique prose complicates the narrative.
How Pylon is regarded
Pylon holds a literary regard score of 57 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.