Novel: A Fable

Overview
William Faulkner’s A Fable (1954) recasts the Passion story as a World War I parable. Set largely over one charged week in 1918, it follows a nameless French corporal whose quiet refusal to fight awakens a mutiny that ripples along the Western Front. Faulkner uses this event to examine power, conscience, and the machinery of modern war, weaving biblical resonance into a dense, multi-voiced narrative that moves between command posts, trenches, and legendary side tales. The novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and remains one of Faulkner’s most ambitious, contentious experiments.

Plot
At the edge of a planned offensive, a French infantry corporal persuades his company, and soon, by tacit contagion, adjacent units, to lay down their arms. The front falls eerily silent as soldiers on both sides refuse to climb from their trenches. Headquarters reels. For the Allied command embodied by the French Marshal, this stoppage threatens not only campaign schedules but the foundations of hierarchical order, national purpose, and the economies tied to war.

The Marshal has the corporal and his twelve closest comrades seized and court-martialed. Behind the formal charges plays a more intimate drama: rumors suggest the Marshal is the corporal’s father, a stark father-son axis shadowing their confrontation. The Marshal offers clemency if the corporal will repudiate the strike and restore discipline; the corporal, steadfast and serene, refuses. His endurance draws followers who see in him an ethic of brotherhood across enemy lines rather than a tactical ploy. To the Marshal, that ethic must be sacrificed to preserve civilization as he conceives it.

Interlaced episodes expand the moral field. A British groom engineers a race with a champion horse, a fable of speed, risk, and bought outcomes that mirrors how institutions ride and break living power. A runner threads the trenches with messages, his relentless motion set against the corporal’s stillness, both forms of service caught in the same web of orders and fate. Artisans and laborers, carpenters, masons, gravediggers, appear as witnesses and makers of the physical world that war consumes and repurposes.

The corporal is executed, along with selected followers, in a ritual echo of crucifixion. Yet the state cannot allow a martyr; it absorbs him. His body is removed and eventually interred as the Unknown Soldier, transformed into a patriotic emblem emptied of dissent. The front resumes firing, the offensive proceeds, and the great machine moves on, even as whispers of the corporal’s “resurrection” circulate among the ranks, a counter-myth of quiet defiance that official ceremony cannot fully erase.

Themes
Faulkner probes the conflict between individual conscience and institutional authority, asking whether a single act of refusal can alter structures sustained by fear, habit, and profit. The novel questions the uses of sacrifice: who demands it, who performs it, and how its meaning is captured or erased by public ritual. Fatherhood and filiation echo through chain-of-command and rumor, casting the Marshal as a worldly deity defending order at the price of mercy. War becomes both a religion and an industry, its liturgy composed of schedules, medals, and funerals that sanctify obedience.

Style and Structure
A Fable is polyphonic and nonlinear, moving through testimony, interrogation, flashback, and legend. Faulkner’s long, sinuous sentences carry a grave, liturgical cadence. Symbols recur, the week’s arc, the twelve companions, the horse, the runner, to refract the Passion narrative through modern mechanized conflict. The result is less a conventional war story than a moral allegory embedded in mud, steel, and ceremony.

Legacy
Acclaimed and contested, the novel’s scale and solemnity divided readers, but its vision of how power appropriates virtue has remained pertinent. As both myth and indictment, A Fable stands as Faulkner’s darkest meditation on the costs of preserving the world as it is.