Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽'s Reviews > The Sound and the Fury

William Faulkner's unforgettable 1929 novel of the "rotting family in the rotting house." It's a somber tale of the tragically dysfunctional Compson family, told with insight and remarkable talent, though it’s definitely not readily accessible. Mostly set in the year 1928, and in the US south in the days of segregation and prejudice (the N-word makes a frequent appearance), The Sound and the Fury has four sections plus an appendix. Three of the sections are narrated by the three Compson brothers, Benjy, Quentin and Jason.

I think the usual no-spoilers rules doesn't work well with this book: it's so difficult to put the pieces together than I think most readers (like me) need all the help they can get. So I'm going to lay the plot all out here. If you're a hardcore non-spoiler person but still want to read this review, skip the next several paragraphs, until you get down to the Macbeth quote.

Section 1: Benjy, the 33 year old brother who was born severely mentally handicapped, narrates the first section, though in actuality he can't speak. He moans and wails and roars. Benjy has no sense of time; all is present to Benjy. So his section very frequently skips from the present to flashbacks of different times in his life, giving us glimpses of the people in the Compson home, and their troubles. Often the shift in time is marked by italics, but it's still pretty confusing. I recommend using a detailed resource that helps you track what year it is in the narrative, like this Cliffnotes page. Benjy is castrated by his cold-hearted brother Jason when he's a teenager and got loose one day and chased some schoolgirls, though he was probably just trying to tell them how much he missed his beloved sister Caddy (Candace). All of the brothers lose their balls in one way or another in this story, Benjy literally and the others metaphorically. To make matters more confusing, Benjy is named Maury, after his shiftless, flashy uncle, until he's 5 years old. There are also two Quentins: Benjy's older brother (who commits suicide in 1910) and Caddy's illegitimate daughter, born a few months later, who lives with the family. Benjy’s ramblings set the stage for the rest of the novel.

Section 2, narrated by Quentin (the brother) shifts back to June 1910, the last day of his life. Quentin has just completed his first year at Harvard University, but is so distraught by his sister Caddy's promiscuity and marriage that he is planning to commit suicide at the end of the day. Everything that happens in this section is colored by that intention. Quentin also has a number of mental flashbacks in his section, which are easier to follow than Benjy's, but Quentin's depressed, neurotic mind made his narrative difficult to follow and unpleasant for me to read, until the last ten pages or so, which were weirdly fascinating, as you become more and more aware of how unhealthy Quentin’s obsession with his sister and purity and honor is.

Section 3: We leap forward to April 1928, a day in the life of Jason, the most venal and unpleasant of the brothers. Jason is now effectively the head of the family. He mistreats his 17 year old niece Quentin, who is rebellious and shamelessly promiscuous. Jason has been stealing the money that Quentin’s mother Caddy sends to Jason for Quentin, gambling it away on cotton futures. Jason is all about control, and he justifies his thefts because back in 1910 Caddy's husband was going to give him a job in banking, which fell through when the husband divorced Caddy because she was pregnant with another man's child. But Quentin ultimately proves not as easy to manipulate as Caddy. It's ugly being inside of Jason's mind.

Section 4: So it's a relief to come to the last section, told by an omniscient narrator, mostly from the point of view of an old family servant, Dilsey. Dilsey tries to keep the family together and protect the others from Jason's rages and abuse, with mixed success. The conflict between Miss Quentin and Jason comes to a head, as Quentin finally gets some of hers back and Jason ineffectually chases her. At the beginning of this section, it reads:

The day dawned bleak and chill. A moving wall of grey light out of the northeast which, instead of dissolving into moisture, seemed to disintegrate into minute and venomous particles ...

It's an apt metaphor for the Compson family's disintegration.

The title of this book comes from a Macbeth quote:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Benjy's literally meaningless sound and fury is the most obvious reference here, but in a broader sense it's about the Compson family generally ... though their distressing tale actually has deep significance to us as readers. Faulkner made me work so hard to put the puzzle pieces together, with stream-of-consciousness and non-linear storytelling, that when I was able to understand the elusive parts of the story, it felt like a major achievement for me as well as him.

The most helpful online source I found while reading this book is this detailed essay: http://www.amerlit.com/novels/ANALYSI.... It follows the plot of the book and helps clarify what's happening, and comments on some of the symbolism. I found it incredibly helpful.

This was a reread/buddy read with Jen. Our discussion is in the thread to this review. There are some interesting comments, but beware of spoilers that may or may not be tagged.

Initial comments: I haven't read this since I was a college English major. I vaguely remember writing a senior essay on it and getting an A on my grade, so I'm sure that partly explains the affection I still have for this novel, even though I remember absolutely nothing about the plot except that there are four (I think, maybe?) different narrators and one is mentally challenged.

But! I've been on a Faulkner roll lately, starting with a couple of his short stories (A Rose for Emily and Barn Burning) and I checked this book out from the library yesterday.