The Sound and the Fury

Many years ago, when I first tried to read this novel, I gave up after three pages. Its title comes from Shakespeare’s Macbeth:  Life, Macbeth says, “is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.”  Indeed, the first of the novel’s four sections is told by an “idiot,” the mentally handicapped Benjy Compson.

A seemingly chaotic assemblage of visual impressions and intrusive memories, the section is, in fact, highly organized and internally consistent. It gradually reveals Benjy’s inchoate sorrow at his sister Caddy's absence from the family, she who alone loved and… show more.

While no one would call Faulkner’s 1929 masterpiece “a surprisingly accessible read,” it remains a landmark of modernism and one of the finest examples of stream of consciousness prose. Faulkner takes readers deep into the minds of his perspective characters, showing the ways they think in real-time as they navigate a day while consumed by past traumas, unstable identities, and inherited historical burdens.

The Sound and the Fury offers the ultimate use of multiple perspectives, what might be called the bible of the form (along with Kurosawa’s groundbreaking film Rashomon). The tragedy of the Compson family is expressed through the stream-of-consciousness, non-linear, very unreliable voices of four characters—Benjy, Quentin, Jason, and Dilsey. Navigating your way through the narration can feel like solving a difficult puzzle, but the payoff is incredibly rewarding.

I’ve read this modern masterpiece three times, and I feel as if I haven’t yet fully read it. It’s a devastating novel filled with such depressing subjects as racism, suicide, misogyny,… show more.