The Sound and the Fury
SynopsisPlot
The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner’s masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.
Story
About this book
The Sound and the Fury follows the Compson family in the American South, once wealthy landowners now struggling to hold on to their standing. The book is divided into four sections, each told from a different vantage point in a distinct style. Among the voices are Benjy, whose sense of time is nonlinear; Quentin, a Harvard student consumed by the family's decline; and Jason, whose cynicism drives the later action.
Faulkner uses stream of consciousness, a way of writing that follows thought as it happens rather than in tidy grammar or chronological order. Benjy's section moves freely between past and present, leaving the reader to assemble events from fragments. A later section turns to Dilsey, the family's Black servant, seen from outside, whose steadiness contrasts with the disorder around her.
The novel is set in Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional part of Mississippi that Faulkner used across many of his books. It was first published in 1929, and its title comes from a speech in Shakespeare's Macbeth. Caddy, the sister at the centre of her brothers' memories, is never given a section of her own, so she is known only through what the others recall of her.
