SOURCE: Bassett, John E. “A Fable: Faulkner's Revision of Filial Conflict.” Renascence 40, no. 1 (fall 1987): 15-29.

In the following essay, Bassett examines the role of A Fable in Faulkner's canon.

A Fable is a troublesome work. Written over a ten-year period, it is essential to understanding Faulkner's intellectual and artistic identity after 1940; but it inspires less interest and commentary than his other big novels. Partly due to its being outside the Yoknapatawpha saga that so involves critics with particular novels and with the relationships between novels, such neglect is also due to internal problems limiting its appeal. In 1966 Michael Millgate wrote that in this “sluggish” work, “Faulkner's writing is … denuded of much of that verbal and metaphorical richness, poetic in quality, vigorous in movement, which marks alike the dialogue and the continuous prose of his novels of the ‘thirties’ and early ‘forties’” (232). Cleanth Brooks has more recently defined the...