The Sound And The Fury

Type of work - Novel

Genre - Modernist novel

Language - English

Narrator - The story is told in four chapters by four different narrators: Benjy, the youngest Compson son; Quentin, the oldest son; Jason, the middle son; and Faulkner himself, acting as an omniscient, third-person narrator who focuses on Dilsey, the Compsons servant.

Point of view - Benjy, Quentin, and Jason narrate in the first person, as participants. They narrate in a stream of consciousness style, attentive to events going on around them in the present, but frequently returning to memories from the past. The final section is narrated in third-person omniscient.

Tone - The world outside the minds of the narrators slowly unravels through personal thoughts, memories, and observations. The tone differs in each chapter, depending on the narrator.

Tense - Present and past

Setting (time) - Three of the chapters are set during Easter weekend, 1928, while Quentins section is set in June, 1910. However, the memories the narrators recall within these sections cover the period from 1898 to 1928.

Setting (place) - Jefferson, Mississippi, and Cambridge, Massachusetts (Harvard University)

Protagonist - The four Compson children: Caddy, Quentin, Benjy, and Jason

Major conflict - The aristocratic Compson familys long fall from grace and struggle to maintain its distinguished legacy. This conflict is manifest in Caddys promiscuity, her out-of-wedlock pregnancy, her short marriage, and the ensuing setbacks and deaths that her family members suffer.

Rising action - Caddys climbing of a tree with muddy drawers; Benjys name change; Caddys pregnancy and wedding; Quentins suicide; Benjys castration; Mr. Compsons death from alcoholism

Climax - Miss Quentins theft of Jasons money, and her elopement with the man with the red tie

Falling action - Dilseys taking Benjy to Easter Sunday service and Benjys trip to the cemetery

Themes - The corruption of Southern aristocratic values; resurrection and renewal; the failure of language and narrative

Motifs - Time; order and chaos; shadows; objectivity and subjectivity

Symbols - Water; Quentins watch; Caddys muddy underclothes; Caddys perfume

Context

William Faulkner was born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, to a prominent Southern family. A number of his ancestors were involved in the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction, and were part of the local railroad industry and political scene. Faulkner showed signs of artistic talent from a young age, but became bored with his classes and never finished high school.

Faulkner grew up in the town of Oxford, Mississippi, and eventually returned there in his later years and purchased his famous estate, Rowan Oak. Oxford and the surrounding area were Faulkners inspiration for the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and its town of Jefferson. These locales became the setting for a number of his works. Faulkners Yoknapatawpha novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down, Moses (1942), and they feature some of the same characters and locations.

Faulkner was particularly interested in the decline of the Deep South after the Civil War. Many of his novels explore the deterioration of the Southern aristocracy after the destruction of its wealth and way of life during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Faulkner populates Yoknapatawpha County with the skeletons of old mansions and the ghosts of great men, patriarchs and generals from the past whose aristocratic families fail to live up to their historical greatness. Beneath the shadow of past grandeur, these families attempt to cling to old Southern values, codes, and myths that are corrupted and out of place in the reality of the modern world. The families in Faulkners novels are rife with failed sons, disgraced daughters, and smoldering resentments between whites and blacks in the aftermath of African-American slavery.

Faulkners reputation as one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century is largely due to his highly experimental style. Faulkner was a pioneer in literary modernism, dramatically diverging from the forms and structures traditionally used in novels before his time. Faulkner often employs stream of consciousness narrative, discards any notion of chronological order, uses multiple narrators, shifts between the present and past tense, and tends toward impossibly long and complex sentences. Not surprisingly, these stylistic innovations make some of Faulkners novels incredibly challenging to the reader. However, these bold innovations paved the way for countless future writers to continue to experiment with the possibilities of the English language. For his efforts, Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949. He died in Mississippi in 1962.

First published in 1929, The Sound and the Fury is recognized as one of the most successfully innovative and experimental American novels of its time, not to mention one of the most challenging to interpret. The novel concerns the downfall of the Compsons, who have been a prominent family in Jefferson, Mississippi, since before the Civil War. Faulkner represents the human experience by portraying events and images subjectively, through several different characters respective memories of childhood. The novels stream of consciousness style is frequently very opaque, as events are often deliberately obscured and narrated out of order. Despite its formidable complexity, The Sound and the Fury is an overpowering and deeply moving novel. It is generally regarded as Faulkners most important and remarkable literary work.