Just finished the wild ride of Chapter V wherein Miss Rosa takes over the narrative and repeats what’s happened, yet shows a different slant because of her own mental baggage.
One thing that I read a bit warily is the drama that Faulkner puts into his work. There are several pages of Rosa describing how she entered the mansion and attempted to fly up the stairs where her niece is waiting, having just found out that her fiancee has been shot by her brother (why is a short story, but Faulkner has managed to write it up to half a book already).
There is more that one can infer from this drama and the length of Rosa’s recital of an event that would take only a paragraph if written by other than Faulkner. It is how she says it, more than what she tells; it is that Shakespearean “methinks she doth protest too much” attitude that speaks footnotes into the actual text. I myself am suspicious that Rosa felt that Judith’s fiancee, Bon, should instead have been presented to her as a possible suitor with marriage the ultimate goal. Rosa feels put upon, feels she has gotten the short end of the stick from her family, particularly since her sister Ellen who married Sutpen and mothered Judith and Henry (while Sutpen additionally fathered Clytie in bedding a slave) was so much older than Rosa that her niece is actually younger than her.
It’s a nice tool, giving the characters each their own voice, and Faulkner does it flawlessly. It’s what drove me nuts in The Sound and The Fury until I accepted him into my soul.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology