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The ostensible subject of The Sound and the Fury is the dissolution of the Compsons, one of those august old Mississippi families that fell on hard times and wild eccentricity after the Civil War. But in fact what William Faulkner is really after in his legendary novel is the kaleidoscope of consciousness--the overwrought mind caught in the act of thought. His rich, dark, scandal-ridden story of squandered fortune, incest (in thought if not in deed), madness, congenital brain damage, theft, illegitimacy, and stoic endurance is told in the interior voices of three Compson brothers: first Benjy, the "idiot" man-child who blurs together three decades of inchoate sensations as he stalks the fringes of the family's former pasture; next Quentin, torturing himself brilliantly, obsessively over Caddy's lost virginity and his own failure to recover the family's honor as he wanders around the seedy fringes of Boston; and finally Jason, heartless, shrewd, sneaking, nursing a perpetual sense of injury and outrage against his outrageous family.
If Benjy's section is the most daringly experimental, Jason's is the most harrowing. "Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say," he begins, lacing into Caddy's illegitimate daughter, and then proceeds to hurl mud at blacks, Jews, his sacred Compson ancestors, his glamorous, promiscuous sister, his doomed brother Quentin, his ailing mother, and the long-suffering black servant Dilsey who holds the family together by sheer force of character.
Notoriously "difficult," The Sound and the Fury is actually one of Faulkner's more accessible works once you get past the abrupt, unannounced time shifts--and certainly the most powerful emotionally. Everything is here: the complex equilibrium of pre-civil rights race relations; the conflict between Yankee capitalism and Southern agrarian values; a meditation on time, consciousness, and Western philosophy. And all of it is rendered in prose so gorgeous it can take your breath away. Here, for instance, Quentin recalls an autumnal encounter back home with the old black possum hunter Uncle Louis:
And we'd sit in the dry leaves that whispered a little with the slow respiration of our waiting and with the slow breathing of the earth and the windless October, the rank smell of the lantern fouling the brittle air, listening to the dogs and to the echo of Louis' voice dying away. He never raised it, yet on a still night we have heard it from our front porch. When he called the dogs in he sounded just like the horn he carried slung on his shoulder and never used, but clearer, mellower, as though his voice were a part of darkness and silence, coiling out of it, coiling into it again. WhoOoooo. WhoOoooo. WhoOooooooooooooooo.What Faulkner has created is a modernist epic in which characters assume the stature of gods and the primal family events resonate like myths. It is The Sound and the Fury that secures his place in what Edmund Wilson called "the full-dressed post-Flaubert group of Conrad, Joyce, and Proust." --David Laskin
Review
“I am in awe of Faulkner’s Benjy, James’s Maisie, Flaubert’s Emma, Melville’s Pip, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—each of us can extend the list. . . . I am interested in what prompts and makes possible this process of entering what one is estranged from.” —Toni Morrison
“No man ever put more of his heart and soul into the written word than did William Faulkner. If you want to know all you can about that heart and soul, the fiction where he put it is still right there.” —Eudora Welty
“No man ever put more of his heart and soul into the written word than did William Faulkner. If you want to know all you can about that heart and soul, the fiction where he put it is still right there.” —Eudora Welty
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Sound advice, to buy this book,
This review is from: The Sound and the Fury (Paperback)
By far the most difficult part about reading S&F was convincing myself that I really wanted to tackle the novel. And yet, upon sitting down to read the book I was immediately engrossed by the Compson's story. A self-proclaimed Faulkner fanatic, S&F presents itself as his most exciting novel. Filled with issues we have all (on some level) contemplated within our own convoluted minds, S&F forces us to reevaluate our understanding of love, family, death, and most importantly why we bother to endure through each day. For those of us desperately searching for connections between Faulkner's books and his Nobel prize speech, S&F unfortunately does not offer any overt references as to how we can or should ultimately prevail. Or does it? Maybe the power found within S&F lies in its refusal to indicate a way in which we should all strive to prevail and instead shows how deeply personal the matter must be for each individual. If you want another great, great book, try Jackson McCrae's THE CHILDREN'S CORNER with its excellent writing style and great insight into the human heart.
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Sound and the Fury invites a number of approaches, methods, and philosophies to those who would interpret it,
By
This review is from: The Sound and the Fury (Paperback)
William Faulkner's fourth novel, The Sound and the Fury, is his first true masterpiece, and considered by many to be his finest work. It was Faulkner's own favorite novel, primarily, he says, because it is his 'most splendid failure.' Depicting the decline of the once aristocratic Compson family. The novel is divided into four parts, each told by a different narrator.
The first part is told from the point of view of Benjy Compson, a thirty three year old 1diot, and has flashbacks of the earliest events in the novel. Benjy is the key to the novel's title. For the most part, his language is simple, short, vocabulary basic sentences. Most of his memories concern his sister, Caddy, who is in some ways the central character in the novel. Benjy's earliest depicted memory, from 1898 -- when he was three -- establishes the essence of her character. Benjy also recalls his name change from Maury to Benjamim in 1900, his brother Quentin's suicide in 1910, and the sequence of events at the gate which lead to his being castrated, also in 1910. The second part recounts the story from Quentin Compson's perspective. (Benjy's brother) Even though the present day of this section is almost eighteen years prior to the present day of Benjy's section, it nevertheless follows roughly the chronological development of the novel, for while many of Benjy's recollections are of their early childhood, most of Quentin's flashbacks record their adolescence, particularly Caddy's dawning sexuality. Quentin's section takes place on the day he commits suicide, and in the present we follow his wanderings around Boston. He is a student at Harvard University as he prepares for death. Like Benjy, he too is obsessed with the past and frequently lapses into flashbacks. Unlike the fairly discrete narratives of Benjy's multiple memories, however, Quentin's are much more fragmentary and usually italicized by word or phrase early in his section and often recurs later with greater detail and embellishment. Quentin's flashbacks also are much more intellectual than Benjy's. Whereas Benjy records mainly sensual impressions, Quentin more often delves into more abstract issues such as character motivation, guilt, honor, and sin. The third part is told by the third Compson brother, Jason, and is set on Good Friday. Unlike his brothers, Jason is much more focused on the present, offering fewer flashbacks, though he does have a few and he refers frequently to events in the past. Jason is a sadist, and his grimly humorous section reveals just how low the Compson family has sunk from Quentin's obsessions over heritage and honor and sin to Jason's near-constant cruelty, complaints, and scheming. The fourth and final part is told from an omniscient viewpoint. And can be called Dilsey's Section because of her prominence in this section, but she is not the sole focus in this section. A long sequence follows Jason as he pursues his niece. The focus is entirely upon the present day, Easter Sunday, and to that end, all traces of Caddy, including her daughter and even the very mention of her name, have been removed. The two main narratives presented in this section are fairly straightforward: Jason's pursuit of his stolen money and his inevitable come uppance when he insults the wrong man in Mottson -- and Dilsey's attendance at an Easter church service, at which a preacher from St. Louis, Reverend Shegog, delivers a sermon which stirs in Dilsey an epiphany of doom for the Compson family. As the novel ends, the two narratives again converge. In the Appendix, titled 'Compson 1699-1945' written to resemble an obituary, Faulkner offers some additional glimpses into Compson family lore, both from the clan's aristocratic past and in the years following the dates in the novel. The Sound and the Fury depicts the tragedy of the decline of the Compson family and much of the novel is told in a stream of consciousness style, in which a character's unadorned thoughts are conveyed in a manner roughly equivalent to the way our minds actually work. The Sound and the Fury is a technical masterpiece for the way William Faulkner incorporates four distinct narrative modes in telling the story of a little girl.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Sounds like fury to me . . .,
This review is from: The Sound and the Fury (Paperback)
I frequently found myself in awe of Faulkner's immense skill as a writer, that he can create something like this. THE SOUND AND THE FURY is divided into four parts, each of which consist of different narrators. The first part is told by, Benjy, a mentally retarded 33 year old. His tale best exemplifies Faulkner's title as his narrative is simply a whole lot of sound and a whole lot of fury. The way Faulkner incorporates Shakespeare's quote from Hamlet into this novel is brilliant. The quote speaks of a "tale told by an idiot", which is exactly how the story begins. But there's really too much to go into-you simply have to read this great novel. I was at times reminded of McCrae with his brilliant bringing together of ideas-they way he did in his BARK OF THE DOGWOOD (a book that owes much to Faulkner.) But SOUND/FURY goes much deeper and will probably remain one of the major classics of the past century. Also recommended: McCrae's CHILDREN'S CORNER
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