Details
Synopsis
A guide to reading "The Sound and the Fury" with a critical and appreciative mind encouraging analysis of plot, style, form, and structure. Also includes background on the author's life and times, sample tests, term paper suggestions, and a reading list., THE SOUND AND THE FURY, Faulkner's fourth novel (1929), is his first true masterpiece. Depicting the decline of the once aristocratic Compson family, the novel is composed of four stream-of-consciousness narratives, each told by a different character with his or her own way of relating events. The first is sweet, gentle Benjy Compson, who at the Christlike age of 33 is severely retarded, writing in an elliptical, time-free, sometimes obscure style. (He describes two men playing golf as: "They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit.") Then the narrative moves back 18 years, to 1910, and is supplied by Benjy's brother Quentin, a student at Harvard about to commit suicide, who is obsessed with his sister, Caddy. The story returns to the present--1928--with the voice of Jason, the third Compson brother, a cruel and rapacious man who reveals certain family secrets that have been hinted at in the other sections, and introduces Caddy's almost grown daughter, also named Quentin. The bulk of the fourth and final section revolves around Dilsey, the black woman who has been a Compson family servant for much of her life. THE SOUND AND THE FURY was Faulkner's own favorite novel, primarily, he says, because it is his "most splendid failure." But many consider it to be his finest work.
Publisher's Notes
First Line: "Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting."
Industry Reviews
"I wrote this book and learned to read....I had gone through all that I had ever read, from Henry James through Henty to newspaper murders, without making any distinction or digesting any of it, as a moth or a goat might. After 'The Sound and the Fury' and without heeding to open another book and in a series of delayed repercussions like summer thunder, I discovered the Flauberts and Dostoievskys and Conrads whose books I had read ten years ago. With 'The Sound and the Fury' I learned to read and quit reading, since I have read nothing since....This is the only one of the seven novels which I wrote without any accompanying feeling of drive or effort, or any following feeling of exhaustion or relief or distaste. When I began it I had no plan at all. I wasn't even writing a book."
New York Times Book Review - William Faulkner (11/05/1972)
"Faulkner performed a labor of imagination that has not been equaled in our time...first, to invent a Mississippi county that was like a mythical kingdom, but was complete and living in all its details; second, to make his story of Yoknapatawpha County stand as a parable of legend of all the Deep South."
Malcolm Cowley
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