Search results
The Sound and the Fury is a novel by the American author William Faulkner. ... In the third section, set a day before the first on April 6, 1928, Faulkner writes from ...
- William Faulkner
- 1929
- Overview
- Structure
- Synopsis
- Context and analysis
- Publication and reception
The Sound and the Fury, novel by William Faulkner, published in 1929, that details the destruction and downfall of the aristocratic Compson family from four different points of view. Faulkner’s fourth novel, The Sound and the Fury is notable for its nonlinear plot structure and its unconventional narrative style.
The Sound and the Fury is divided into four sections. The first three are presented from the perspectives of the three Compson sons: Benjamin (“Benjy,” born Maury), the “idiot”; Quentin, the suicidal student; and Jason, the failed businessman. The fourth section has a third-person omniscient narrator. All but the second section are set in fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, in April 1928.
Britannica Quiz
Famous Novels, Last Lines Quiz
The four sections, despite their formal differences, overlap in important ways. In essence, they tell the same story—that of the elusive Compson daughter, Candace (“Caddy”), who was divorced by her husband and disowned by her family after it was revealed that her child, Quentin (“Miss Quentin,” named for her uncle), had been conceived out of wedlock. When the disgraced Caddy left the Compson household in 1911, she did not take her daughter. Miss Quentin remained with the family to be raised as a Compson. Although her presence is pervasive throughout, Caddy does not actually appear in the novel. She is reconstructed through the memories of her three brothers, each of whom remembers and relates to her in a different way.
The events of the first section of The Sound and the Fury take place some 17 years after Caddy’s departure. The first section is notoriously difficult to read: its narrator, Benjy, has an intellectual disability. The precise character of his disability is not known; he is sometimes called a “looney” or, more commonly, an “idiot.” Evidently, his disability affects his ability to speak (he communicates by “moaning”) and to reason. It also distorts his sense of time, such that he cannot distinguish between the past and the present. Benjy experiences all time as the present and thus narrates all events, including and especially memories of past events, as though they occur in the present. Unbeknownst to him, the events he narrates as “the present” actually span a 30-year period, from 1898 to 1928.
Benjy’s section opens on April 7, 1928. In the first scene of the novel, Benjy and his caretaker, Luster, search for a lost quarter near a fenced golf course. Benjy, following Luster, climbs through a break in the fence and gets caught on a nail. The sensation reminds him of an earlier time (1902) when Caddy uncaught him and led him through the fence. This memory provokes another: Benjy remembers visiting a cemetery to see the graves of his father and brother (1912 or 1913). A nearby golfer’s call for his “caddie” recalls more memories of Caddy; Benjy remembers Caddy’s wedding (1910) and Caddy’s leaving (1911) and also the sight of Caddy’s muddy underwear on the day of his grandmother’s funeral (1898).
In the present action, Benjy and Luster return to the Compson house. There they see Caddy’s daughter, Miss Quentin, embracing a boy on a swing. Benjy remembers seeing Caddy embracing a boy on the same swing, some time ago (1908 or 1909). For a moment, mother and daughter become indistinguishable to Benjy; then, Miss Quentin sees and snaps at him. As Benjy enters the Compson house, his thoughts turn to his castration several years earlier and to the events leading up to the loss of Caddy’s virginity (1909). His section ends in his room, 30 years before it began, with the memory of Caddy holding him on the night she muddied her underwear (1898).
Exclusive academic rate for students! Save 67% on Britannica Premium.
Learn More
The second section commences on June 2, 1910, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where its narrator, Quentin, attends Harvard University. Although Quentin has no intellectual disability, Quentin’s section, like Benjy’s, oscillates between the past and the present. The actions of the present (here, 1910) are Quentin’s as he prepares to commit suicide. Quentin’s preparations are partly practical and partly symbolic: they include breaking his grandfather’s watch, packing up his belongings, writing letters to his loved ones, purchasing weights (two six-pound flatirons) with which to drown himself, and visiting the nearby Charles River Bridge, where he will eventually commit suicide.
The Sound and the Fury was written (and is set) in the postbellum American South, in the period after Reconstruction (1865–77). At this critical moment in American history, the South was in the process of redefining itself and its values in the absence of slavery. Certain Southern families (typically old landed families) refused to participate in this process. Instead, they turned inward; they clung to their traditions and values—to vague notions of honour, purity, and virginity.
The Sound and the Fury documents the decline of these families. The Compsons, as Faulkner casts them, are direct descendants of the planter-aristocrats. They are the inheritors of their values and traditions, on whom the survival (or ultimate extinction) of this Southern aristocracy depends. The Compsons, for the most part, shirk this responsibility. Quentin, however, does not. The burden of the past falls heavily upon Quentin, who, as the eldest son, feels he must preserve and protect the Compson family honour. Quentin identifies his sister as the principal bearer of the honour he is to protect. When he fails to protect that honour—that is, when Caddy loses her virginity to Dalton Ames and becomes pregnant—Quentin elects to commit suicide. Quentin’s suicide, in conjunction with Caddy’s pregnancy, precipitates the fall of the Compson family. Still, for nearly two decades, the family survives. Its death knell is tolled on April 8, 1928, by Miss Quentin, who “swung herself by a rainpipe” to the locked window of her uncle’s bedroom, took her mother’s money, “climbed down the same rainpipe in the dusk,” and vanished, taking with her not only the money but the last semblance of the Compson family honour. At the end of the novel, the Compson family is in ruins and, on a larger scale, the Southern aristocracy is too.
The Sound and the Fury’s form is distinctly Modernist: Faulkner employs a number of narrative techniques, including unreliable narrators, interior monologues, and unconventional syntax, that are recurrent features of literary Modernism. Faulkner’s conception of time, particularly as expressed in his nonlinear representation of time, is a cause of disagreement among scholars, who argue over which different philosophies influenced Faulkner and to what extent. A number of scholars, for example, have made the case for a link between Faulkner’s conception of time and the theory of duration formulated by French philosopher Henri Bergson. Such an argument places Faulkner among a number of Modernist writers influenced by Bergson, including Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot. The title of Faulkner’s novel alone expresses Faulkner’s concern with time. The Sound and the Fury takes its name from a soliloquy given by the title character of William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth. In that soliloquy, Macbeth reflects on time and the meaninglessness of life:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time.
The Sound and the Fury was released by the American publisher Cape & Smith on October 7, 1929, in a first printing of 1,789 copies. It did not sell quickly; the novel’s difficult first section deterred many capable readers. This came as no surprise to Faulkner, who, prior to publication, told his agent that The Sound and the Fury ought to be printed “with different color types for the different times in Benjy’s section” to make the text “simpler.” Faulkner, to his dismay, was told this was not possible. (It was, however, accomplished in 2012, when the Folio Society printed a limited edition multicoloured version of the novel.)
Initial critical reactions to The Sound and the Fury were mixed. Critics generally recognized and commended the novel’s ambition and technical complexity, but they found its material base and, as one critic put it, “unworthy of the enormous and complex craftsmanship” expended on it. For better or for worse, critics compared the novel to James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922), which employed a similar style of narration that incorporated interior monologues and streams of consciousness.
Years after its publication, Faulkner expressed his dissatisfaction with The Sound and the Fury. In 1957 he described it to graduate students at the University of Virginia as a series of failures:
And I tried first to tell it with one brother, and that wasn’t enough… I tried with another brother, and that wasn’t enough… I tried the third brother… And that failed and I tried myself—the fourth section—to tell what happened, and I still failed.
Full Title The Sound and the Fury. Author William Faulkner. Type of work Novel. Genre Modernist novel. Language English. Time and place written 1928; Oxford, Mississippi. Date of first publication 1929. Publisher Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith.
The Sound and the Fury is set in Mississippi in the early 1900s, and primarily follows the decline of the Compsons, a white aristocratic family. When the South was defeated in the Civil War in the 1860s, slavery was abolished and many of the wealthy families lost their source of income. Reconstruction, a period following the war and intended to ...
First published in 1929, The Sound and the Fury was Faulkner’s fourth novel and marked a significant departure from his earlier work. The novel is set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, a setting Faulkner would revisit in many of his subsequent works. The story is divided into four sections, each narrated by a different character, and ...
The Sound and the Fury is a modernist novel published by William Faulkner in 1929. It tells the story of the Compson family’s fall from grace and the tragedies that befall their four children, Cady, Quientin, Benjy, and Jason, whose perspectives make up each section of the novel. Known for its impressive deployment of the stream of ...
People also ask
Where is the sound and the Fury Set?
What happened in the sound and the Fury?
How many sections are there in the sound and the Fury?
How does the sound and the Fury start?
The Sound and the Fury literally begins as a “tale / Told by an idiot,” as the first chapter is narrated by the mentally disabled Benjy. The novel’s central concerns include time, much like Macbeth’s “[t]omorrow, and tomorrow”; death, recalling Macbeth’s “dusty death”; and nothingness and disintegration, a clear reference to ...
