The Subjective Intensities of Faulkner's Flags in the Dust

William Faulkner's third novel was published under the title of Sartoris early in 1929. The novel that Faulkner had actually written — it was finished in the autumn of 1927 — was entitled Flags in the Dust; at the insistence of its first publisher, eleven other firms having turned it down, his agent cut Faulkner's manuscript by almost a fourth, an operation in which the author could not bring himself to participate. The uncut version was finally published in 1973, eleven years after Faulkner's death, and no matter what reservations one may have about the definitiveness of its text, Flags in the Dust must come to take the place of Sartoris in Faulkner's canon not only because it more closely approximates the novel he wrote and wanted to have published, but also because, as Douglas Day says in his introduction to Flags in the Dust, "it is a more complete fictional document of a time and place in history [and] a better introduction to the grand and complex southern world that William Faulkner was to write about until he died."1

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