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Although critical voices that reproach the writer for the incoherence of Benjy’s narrative may be justified at first sight, a closer inspection reveals that it is much less incoherent than it appears. In my paper, I will argue that there are several ways in which the author helps the reader to construct a more or less coherent story line out of the fragmented events that happened in the course of about thirty years. Secondly, I want to demonstrate that functional-semantic approaches to text analysis, such as Systemic Functional Grammar or Text Linguistics, can be effectively employed in analysing and interpreting literary texts. Finally, I try to find a psychological explanation of how Benjy’s incoherence is made readable by the interworking between the coherence-seeking dispositions of the reader and the ingenious cohesive devices used by the writer.