Sartoris by William Faulkner
Published 1929 · 358 pages · 80,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is Sartoris to read?
Sartoris scores 41 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: 60 out of 100
- Early Faulknerian prose with Southern social registers and World War I military vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Lyrical, sometimes overwrought sentences that foreshadow the mature Faulkner style without fully achieving it.
- Abstraction: 42 out of 100
- Themes of legacy and trauma conveyed through family dynamics and Bayard's behavior rather than abstract reflection.
- Information density: 42 out of 100
- Multiple family members and their histories, plus the Benbow subplot, packed into a moderately sized novel.
- Narrative indirection: 38 out of 100
- Third-person narration with temporal shifts and embedded family stories, less radical than Faulkner's later experiments.
- Symbolic density: 42 out of 100
- The airplane, the Civil War legends, and Bayard's reckless driving all carry symbolic weight about Southern decline.
- Ironic distance: 35 out of 100
- Faulkner's sympathy for the Sartorises is tempered by ironic awareness of their self-destructive mythology.
- Resolution withholding: 30 out of 100
- Bayard's fate resolves, though the larger question of whether the Sartoris legacy can survive modernity remains open.
- Structural complexity: 38 out of 100
- Dual-family narrative with temporal shifts and the compressed remnants of a longer manuscript.
How Sartoris is regarded
Sartoris holds a literary regard score of 59 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.