This novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1955. An allegorical story of World War I, set in the trenches in France and dealing ostensibly with a mutiny in a French regiment, it was originally considered a sharp departure for Faulkner. Recently it has come to be recognized as one of his major works and an essential part of the Faulkner oeuvre. Faulkner himself fought in the war, and his descriptions of it "rise to magnificence," according to The New York Times, and include, in Malcolm Cowley's words, "some of the most powerful scenes he ever conceived."

A Fable

Although  A Fable  is unreasonably opaque, being pitifully unconvincing is a real trouble with the novel so, despite the immeasurable messianic ambitiousness, it didn’t suit to become the Newest Testament. The war is raging around and four apocalyptic horsemen are galloping all over the planet…  ‘It wasn’t we who invented war,’ the group commander said. ‘It was war which created us. From the loins of man’s furious ineradicable greed sprang the captains and the colonels to his necessity. We are his responsibility; he shall not shirk it.’  Generals didn’t invent war but war became their vocation… They are sculptors of war… To exist they need war… But unexpectedly the messiah appears and he orders to stop war and in spite of all febrility, fury and ferocity of war Herods the fighting came to a dead halt…  ‘War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to rid the body of fever. So the purpose of a war is to end the war. We’ve known that for six thousand years. The trouble was, it took us six thousand years to learn how to do it. For six thousand years we labored under the delusion that the only way to stop a war was to get together more regiments and battalions than the enemy could, or vice versa, and hurl them upon each other until one lot was destroyed and, the one having nothing left to fight with, the other could stop fighting. We were wrong, because yesterday morning, by simply declining to make an attack, one single French regiment stopped us all.’  However, the world isn’t saved… Messiahs are only capable to get themselves crucified and to make others suffer.

Books like A Fable

A Fable

Cross-category suggestions