A little girl with muddy drawers climbs a pear tree to peer through a window at her grandmother's funeral, and three brothers spend their lives trying to recover or destroy what that image meant. William Faulkner published this novel in 1929, dividing it among four narrators whose voices range from the timeless present of Benjy, who experiences all of time at once, to the cold ledger-keeping of Jason, who has replaced feeling with commerce. The Compson family's disintegration mirrors the collapse of the old South, but Faulkner's ambition exceeded allegory. He wanted to capture consciousness itself, the way memory folds and fractures under the weight of loss. Dilsey endures. That verb, in Faulkner's world, is the highest praise.