Two things at which Faulkner excels

There's so much in William Faulkner's The Hamlet that I remain surprised that it's not often mentioned among his greatest works - perhaps overshadowed by some of the others because it is a bit sprawling, composed of four sections that stand independently as novellas though each develops the life story of a different member of the Snopes clan as the family gradually becomes ascendant over the Varners in the social hierarchy and commerce of the backwater hamlet Frenchman's Bend. The 3rd section, The Long Summer, as noted yesterday is both a showcase for Faulkner's over-wrought and unique style and a compendium of literary modes: it's a very dark comedy, up to a point, following the mentally disabled Isaac Snopes in his obsession with a cow, then turns even darker, as the men in the town make a sport of watching him have sex with the animal - until one man stands up and puts a stop to it more or less arranges a plan to end the desecration by butchering the animal - and then the story becomes tragic - as Mink Snopes believes he has been hoodwinked in the deal to sell and butcher the cow and ambushes and assassinates one of the village cranks, Houston, and then leads everyone on a wild pursuit until they catch him at last and imprison him in the county jail. Obviously Faulkner is probably the greatest American writer at point-of-view or stream-of-consciousness writing, able to capture the movement of character's mind and this holds true for highly different and divergent characters - a technique he learned from Joyce I would guess but executed w/ his own Southern flamboyance: he shows us how each character's mind works but in language that is distinctly his (Faulkner's) own - they all think differently but sound alike. Another thing at which Faulkner excels is back-story: in each of the narratives in The Hamlet and in many other works as well he is moving forward with a narrative and then stops short and jumps back in time to fill in the history of the character, and often this history is so rich and complex it becomes, or eclipses, the story itself. That's not so much the case in The Hamlet, however, to its strength: F will take a rustic and unsympathetic character like Mink and then, as he's confronting his wife and hitting her across the mouth, jump back in time and tell the story of Mink's childhood and how he met his wife and saved her from a life as a prostitute in a logging camp - and when we return to the present-tense narrative we think of all the characters entirely differently - as is, of course, the case in life: What we think, what we see in people, is dependent on how much we know of their "life story."