The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner
Summary
Faulkner tells the collapse of the once prominent Compson family of Mississippi through four different narrators, each covering roughly the same stretch of family history from a completely different vantage point. Benjy, intellectually disabled and unable to track time in any ordinary sequence, narrates in fragments built almost entirely around memories of his sister Caddy, the one person in the family who ever showed him real tenderness, memories that keep circling back to her loss of virginity and eventual banishment from the family more than to anything happening in Benjy's own present. Quentin, the eldest brother, narrates from Harvard on the day in 1910 he has decided will be his last, consumed by an obsession with Caddy's sexuality that edges toward an imagined or half confessed incest, and the section ends with him breaking his pocket watch and drowning himself in the Charles River. Jason, the remaining brother, narrates next in a voice of pure, petty resentment, furious over the bank job Caddy's husband promised him and never delivered and stealing from the money Caddy sends home for her own daughter, Miss Quentin, who eventually steals the money back from him and escapes down a tree outside her window. A final section, following the family's Black cook Dilsey on Easter Sunday, watches the Compsons finish disintegrating from the outside, and the novel closes with Luster driving Benjy around the Confederate monument the wrong way until Jason, having failed to catch Miss Quentin, seizes the reins and turns the carriage back onto the one route that keeps Benjy calm, order restored to exactly one broken person in an otherwise ruined family.
Faulkner abandons linear chronology and conventional punctuation almost entirely in the first two sections, dropping a reader directly into Benjy's and Quentin's consciousness with no signposts for what year or even what decade a given memory belongs to. It reads as one of the most demanding widely read novels in American fiction, genuinely disorienting on a first pass, and rereading it is less an optional pleasure than close to a requirement for understanding what actually happened to this family and when.
Faulkner took his title from Macbeth's description of life as a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, a line that describes Benjy's own narration almost too precisely. He later wrote a genealogical appendix tracing the Compson family from 1699 to 1945 without rereading the novel first, and the appendix quietly contradicts a few details of the original book, including exactly how Miss Quentin makes her final escape.
Historical Context & Significance
The novel sold poorly on its October 1929 publication by Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, and Clifton Fadiman, reviewing it in The Nation, dismissed the theme and characters as trivial, unworthy of the enormous and complex craftsmanship Faulkner had expended on them. No prize considered it. It found a wider readership only after Faulkner's next novel, Sanctuary, made his name notorious enough that curious readers started working backward through his earlier books.
Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, twenty years after this novel appeared, and the citation named no single book, honoring instead what it called his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel. None of it belongs to The Sound and the Fury in particular. The novel is now treated as a landmark of American modernism, its four narrators still assigned in university courses as one of the clearest demonstrations of what stream of consciousness narration can actually do to a reader.