The Reivers by William Faulkner
Published 1963 · 305 pages · 96,000 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is The Reivers to read?
The Reivers scores 52 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. 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: 55 out of 100
- Faulkner writes in his characteristic Southern idiom, but more accessibly than his earlier work. The vocabulary captures turn-of-the-century Mississippi with warmth, incorporating dialect and the specific language of horses, automobiles, and childhood adventure.
- Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
- Sentences are often long and discursive but more readable than Faulkner's difficult novels. The prose has the rhythm of oral storytelling, with the old narrator looking back at his youthful adventure.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- The novel explores innocence, initiation, and what a boy learns when thrown among adults through an automobile adventure to Memphis. The comic escapade becomes a gentle education in human complexity.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Early automobile culture, Mississippi class and race relations, and the textures of turn-of-the-century Southern life layer through the narrative. Faulkner builds his world through accumulated attention to roads, stables, and the rituals of a changing South.
- Narrative indirection: 52 out of 100
- The elderly narrator looks back on childhood events, filtering them through decades of understanding. The reader must interpret what the boy learned and what the old man still puzzles over.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- The automobile becomes symbolic of modernity arriving in the rural South. The horse race becomes symbolic of how Lucius earns his place in the adult world. The journey becomes symbolic of initiation into life's complexities.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Faulkner maintains gentle ironic distance from his narrator's younger self while remaining affectionate toward the adventure. The novel is comic about human folly while serious about moral growth.
- Resolution withholding: 48 out of 100
- Lucius returns home educated by experience. Faulkner offers the resolution without claiming childhood innocence can be recovered or that wisdom compensates for what's lost.
- Structural complexity: 50 out of 100
- The novel follows a single adventure through retrospective narration. The structure is accessible, making this one of Faulkner's most approachable works.
How The Reivers is regarded
The Reivers holds a literary regard score of 60 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.