Intruder in the Dust
by William Faulkner
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Book Summary Information
Author: William FaulknerEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1991-10-29
ISBN: 0679736514
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Vintage
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780679736516
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Book Reviews of Intruder in the Dust
Book Review: Faulkner had it wrong but with perfect accuracy
Summary: 5 Stars
We are in the South, in a rural city and area. A crime is committed, a white man is shot dead and an old black man is arrested for it on Saturday night, red-handed, because he was next to the dead shot body with a gun in his pocket. This black man has had a past of refusing samboism. He always behaved in a non standard way for a black man in the South. No question is asked. A lawyer is called by the black man and the lawyer does not ask questions and assumes the black man is guilty of the crime he is accused of committing. It will take a white teenager (16 and the lawyer's nephew), a black teenager (his friend) and a white older lady with a truck to accept to go and explore the grave of the dead man on the request of the black man. They find out the man in the grave is not the man it should be, but is another assassinated white man. And then the plot thickens tremendously because these three people plus the lawyer will manage to take over and convince the sheriff to go investigate this tomb with them. The father and two sons of the victim have been summoned by the sheriff. The two sons will dig out the grave and find it empty. Then they all manage to find the body the teenagers and the woman had found more or less carelessly hidden in some sand and the body of the first assassinated person in a patch of quicksand. The black man is definitely saved. The criminal will be found out to be a fourth son of the old man, a brother of the victim himself because the murdering brother was cheating some wood out of a forest patch that was being cut down and sawn into boards to be sold later on, at a profit of course, from the assassinated brother with an accomplice, the second man who was killed two days later and hidden in the assassinated brother's tomb. This murdering brother will be forced to commit suicide in jail for the white community not to have a trial, not to have to hang a white man for the killing of two white men while at first a black man had been accused and had by pure chance escaped a lynching. But the book is interesting for a lot more than this murder plot. It is no thriller because we nearly know from the very start that the lynching will not happen. The interest of the book is in the narrator who looks at the situation and events through the sole eyes of the lawyer's nephew that is always referred to as "he", third person singular, and never with a name. This awkward narration creates a distanciation in the fictional voyeurism of the book that kind of keeps us active and alert. The second interest is in the long speeches and explanations the lawyer delivers to his nephew in order to initiate him to adulthood. The discourse is a general speculation about racism, samboism, the liberation of black people or rather of the South from this samboism and racism, how it can only happen from inside and not from outside, the reaction of the whites in front of this accused black and the possibility or impossibility of a lynching, etc. It is a close examination of the racial conscience of the South, and not only the whites, but also the blacks. The third interest is in the initiation of this young teenager that goes far beyond only understanding the southern mind, the southern past and future, the southern race relations and how to free them from the heritage of slavery and the end of it imposed from outside. It has to do with physical growing and even the sexual or emotional levels of that growing, how some sexual emotion can appear in the strangest of all situations and distort the teenager's vision for a while. Finally it also depicts the complexity and beauty, contradictory confusion and clarity of their mentality and consciousness, or unconsciousness. Faulkner has it all wrong as for how the liberation of the blacks will come, but it does not matter : it represents the vision the whites had at a certain moment in history, in fact between the two world wars. He could not take into account the consequences of WW2 on the mental liberation of the black community and particularly the weight and power northern blacks will find in the war that will make them go down South, if necessary and with white people too eventually, to help their black brothers down South to get on the road to civil liberties. But it is this very historical limitation that makes the novel all the more interesting.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne
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