Many critics rank it above The Sound and the Fury. Competing, contradictory narrators try to reconstruct the story of Thomas Sutpen, and the impossibility of knowing history becomes the subject itself. The style is nearly impenetrable and absolutely necessary. It contains Faulkner's most famous line about the South: "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.