Ryan Larson - Faulkner and the Journey

 I've recently been reading some Faulkner short novels, and I thought I'd try and relate some of them to what we've talked about in class. The one I'll focus on is called Spotted Horses, and it's about a small Mississippi town that is terrorized by some very wild horses. The 'villain' of the story, Flem Snopes, brings the horses in from Texas to sell to the townspeople. However, the horses are too wild to be tamed and they escape and wreak havoc in the countryside. What stood out to me about this story was that it doesn't follow the typical story structure of rising action, climax, falling action, etc. This is a little similar to the other short novels I've read-- in The Bear, for instance, you might think that the main conflict is between the main character and the titular bear. But the bear (spoiler alert) is killed before the book is halfway over. This relates to the concept I've touched on in other blogs that a person's story is often not a straight line with a start and end. We often don't know what our motivations and goals are, and they frequently change. The story structure that is often used for books and movies with a set start middle and end (ie three acts) is useful for making a story relatable and understandable, but it isn't always accurate. Think of it as how dialogue in movies isn't actually how people sound in real life-- because the way people actually talk is boring. The conventional story structure is a way to help the reader understand what's going on and have a general guess as to what's going to happen next. Faulkner, however, seems to like confusing the reader. He uses unreliable narrators, non-chronological structure, and other techniques to make you feel as though you only have a slight grasp of what's going on. I'd recommend you read his books if you haven't, they're very good.

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