A Fable

BOOKS BY WILLIAM FAULKNER

The Marble Faun (1924)

Soldier’s Pay (1926)

Mosquitoes (1927)

Sartoris (1929)

[Flags in the Dust (1973)]

The Sound and the Fury (1929)

As I Lay Dying (1930)

Sanctuary (1931)

These 13 (1931)

Light in August (1932)

A Green Bough (1933)

Doctor Martino and Other Stories (1934)

Pylon (1935)

Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

The Unvanquished (1938)

The Wild Palms [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem] (1939)

The Hamlet (1940)

Go Down, Moses (1942)

Intruder in the Dust (1948)

Knight’s Gambit (1949)

Collected Stories of William Faulkner (1950)

Notes on a Horsethief (1951)

Requiem for a Nun (1954)

A Fable (1954)

Big Woods (1955)

The Town (1957)

The Mansion (1959)

The Reivers (1962)

Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner (1979, Posthumous)

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, OCTOBER 2011

Copyright © 1950, 1954 by William Faulkner

Copyright renewed 1978, 1982 by Jill Faulkner Summers

Notes copyright © 1994 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc.

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., in 1954. This revised text and the notes are reprinted from Novels 1942–1954 by William Faulkner, published by The Library of America, in 1994, by permission.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Faulkner, William, 1897–1962.

A fable.

1. European War, 1914–1918—Fiction. I. Title.

PZ.F272Fab7 PS3511.A86

813′.5′2

77-3039

eISBN: 978-0-307-79213-6

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

To my daughter, Jill

To William Bacher and Henry Hathaway of Beverly Hills, California, who had the basic idea from which this book grew into its present form; to James Street in whose volume, Look Away, I read the story of the hanged man and the bird; and to Hodding Carter and Ben Wasson of the Levee Press, who published in a limited edition the original version of the story of the stolen racehorse, I wish to make grateful acknowledgment.

W.F.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This edition of A Fable follows the text as corrected in 1994 by Noel Polk. The copy-text for this edition is the ribbon typescript setting copy at the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia. An editors’ note on the corrections by Noel Polk follows the text; the line and page notes were prepared by Joseph Blotner.

Contents

Cover

William Faulkner’s Works

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Publisher’s Note

Wednesday

Monday: Monday Night

Tuesday Night

Monday: Tuesday: Wednesday

Tuesday: Wednesday

Tuesday: Wednesday: Wednesday Night

Wednesday Night

Thursday: Thursday Night

Friday: Saturday: Sunday

Tomorrow

Editors’ Note

William Faulkner: (1897–1962)

Also by William Faulkner

Academic Resources for Educators

Vintage International

Wednesday

Long before the first bugles sounded from the barracks within the city and the cantonments surrounding it, most of the city was already awake. These did not need to rise from the straw mattresses and thin pallet beds of their hive-dense tenements, because few of them save the children had ever lain down. Instead, they had huddled all night in one vast tongueless brotherhood of dread and anxiety, about the thin fires of braziers and meagre hearths, until the night wore at last away and a new day of anxiety and dread had begun.