About 7 h 30 min · at 30 minutes a day, about 15 days
Estimated from the page count of this edition. Dense books can take longer than the estimate.
About the book
In France in 1918, a corporal persuades three thousand French soldiers to refuse an order to attack. When the German troops opposite them also stop fighting, the mutiny threatens the authority of commanders on both sides. Across a week, Faulkner builds a Christian allegory around the corporal and his followers, asking how war can continue when the men ordered to wage it put down their weapons.
Reader notes
Dense language, extended arguments and interwoven episodes make the novel demanding to follow. Its treatment of war is philosophical and religious as well as physical, and the violence and suicide are serious subjects.
How it reads
Writing style
Dense · Ornate
Tone
Bleak · Earnest · Philosophical
Structure
Braided
Driven by
Character · Ideas
Point of view
Third person, omniscient
Setting
France
Reading complexity
Writing
5 / 5
Ideas
4 / 5
Structure
4 / 5
Background knowledge
2 / 5
About this profile
Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).
Writing
How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas
How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure
How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge
Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity
Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.
Themes
Freedom
Morality
Oppression
Power
Religion and faith
War
Content notes
Violence
Strong
Sexual content
Mild
Swearing
Mild
Substance use
Mild
Abuse
None
Self-harm or suicide
Strong
Standing and awards
Canonical
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1955
National Book Award, 1955
Library of America
Author: Nobel Prize in Literature, 1949
Questions readers ask
How long is it?
370 pages in the Vintage Books 1978 mass market paperback edition.
Which edition is shown here?
Vintage Books · 1978 · Mass Market Paperback. ISBN 9780394724133.
How long does it take to read A Fable?
About 7 hours 30 minutes at 50 pages an hour, based on the 370-page Vintage Books edition. Dense books can take longer.
About the author
William Faulkner
William Faulkner made the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, the setting for an exacting body of novels and stories about families, communities, and the burdens of Southern history. His fiction ranges among poor white laborers, Black Southerners, and declining aristocratic households, with particular attention to racial violence, class, religion, inheritance, and thwarted ambition. Faulkner’s characteristic methods are structural as much as verbal. Dense, carefully cadenced prose follows memory and obsession through stream of consciousness, abrupt shifts in time, and narrators whose accounts remain partial or unreliable. In The Sound and the Fury, the Compson family’s collapse emerges from several radically different perspectives, forcing chronology to be reconstructed from fragments. As I Lay Dying distributes a family’s funeral journey among fifteen narrators, exposing conflicting motives within a shared undertaking. Absalom, Absalom! pushes this method further as Quentin Compson and others repeatedly revise the story of Thomas Sutpen’s ruined dynasty, making conjecture and inherited testimony part of the novel’s account of slavery and patriarchal power.
