The Sound and the Fury is a novel by the American author William Faulkner, published in 1929. Faulkner's fourth novel, it is the second to be set in Yoknapatawpha County and the first featuring the Compson family, both of which would reappear in his later fiction. The novel's highly experimental style, including its use of stream of consciousness and multiple different unreliable narrators, are hallmarks of modernist literature. Its bleak and candid portrait of Southern life in the early 20th century is paradigmatic of the Southern Gothic genre.
The Sound and the Fury centers around Quentin, Benjy, Jason, and Caddy Compson as their wealthy Mississippi family descends into chaos and disorder. Each of the siblings has unique problems that impact the others, such as Benjy's mental disability, Caddy's promiscuity, Quentin's neuroticism, and Jason's impulsiveness. The history of the Compson family is primarily revealed through sudden, unannounced flashbacks, as most of the novel takes place on a single weekend in 1928.
Although it did not initially find commercial success, after the publication of Faulkner's novel Sanctuary, The Sound and the Fury grew in popularity and Faulkner began to receive critical attention. It was instrumental in helping Faulkner to win the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. Now considered by scholars to be one of Faulkner's best novels, it has been described as "one of the most complex novels in America's literary history."
Composition and publication
William Faulkner began writing The Sound and the Fury after a difficult experience publishing his third novel, Flags in the Dust. Because Faulkner's first two novels, Soldiers' Pay and Mosquitoes, sold poorly, the publisher Horace Liveright declined to publish Flags. Faulkner spent nearly a year trying to find an alternate publisher, and finally settled for Harcourt Brace, which only agreed to publish a substantially abridged version under the name Sartoris. Faulkner worried he would never be published again, and wrote The Sound and the Fury without expecting it to be marketable or published within the decade. Faulkner originally planned The Sound and the Fury as a short story, which would explore the thoughts of children sent away from their grandmother's funeral. He was also inspired by the image of a girl climbing a tree while her brothers looked up at her muddy underwear. Faulkner's working title for the novel was Twilight. The final title comes from a soliloquy in Macbeth, in which the title character describes life as "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing".
Faulkner drew inspiration from his own life. His own family had declined since the time of his great grandfather, who had been a colonel. When Faulkner was 10 years old, he and his two brothers lived with their female cousin Sallie. The four experienced the death of Faulkner's maternal grandmother, whom he called "Damuddy"; in the novel, Quentin Compson is the same age when his Damuddy dies. Faulkner knew a mentally disabled man in Oxford, Mississippi named Edwin Chandler, who was known for running behind a fence, and later wrote a story for the mentally disabled daughter of one of his professors at the University of Mississippi. When Faulkner's childhood love Estelle Oldham married another man, leaving him distraught, Faulkner took his mind off her by visiting his friend Phil Stone in New Haven, Connecticut. This trip inspired Quentin's experiences at Harvard and his relationship with his roommate Shreve. Shreve himself was based on a friend of Stone's named Stephen Benet, and was named after Benet's Yale roommate. Dilsey was modeled after Caroline Barr, the Faulkner family's servant.
Faulkner's stream of consciousness writing style was inspired by the works of James Joyce. Faulkner was also inspired by Ernest Hemingway; The Sound and the Fury borrows language from Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises to describe Benjy's castration. The novel also strongly resembles My Ántonia by Willa Cather: both novels use multiple perspectives to show the decay of a family with four children, both feature a mentally impaired brother, a dedicated servant, and a woman who is only seen from outside perspectives, and both prominently feature suicide. Faulkner also drew on his earlier short story The Kingdom of God, which also involved a mentally disabled character, and his then-unpublished stories That Evening Sun and A Justice, which both featured the character of Quentin Compson.
Faulkner finished the manuscript in Greenwich Village. In March 1928, he sent the manuscript to Harcourt Brace, which had published Sartoris. Harcourt Brace rejected the novel, but one of the company's editors, Harrison Smith, felt it deserved to be published. Smith formed a new publishing company called Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, which agreed to publish Faulkner's book. Faulkner extensively rewrote Quentin's section before the novel's publication. In particular, he moved the confrontation between Quentin and Caddy over Dalton Ames to three different positions; although it began as the opening scene of the chapter, Faulkner ultimately placed it at the end. He also experimented with the use of punctuation in Benjy's chapter as late as the galley proofs. Ben Wasson, the novel's editor, initially removed the italics from the first chapter and instead planned to represent its time shifts with line breaks, but Faulkner wrote Wasson a letter demanding he restore the italics. The book was finally published on October 7, 1929. Jonathan Cape commissioned one of their previously established writers, fellow Southern modernist Evelyn Scott, to produce a booklet analyzing the literary merit and justifying the difficulty of Faulkner's style to the American reading public, which was to be included with each copy of the initial run of the book. As the publisher's copy reads within the booklet, the hope of such an inclusion was to assert that: "'The Sound and the Fury' should place William Faulkner in company with Evelyn Scott."
Plot summary The Compsons, a once-prosperous white family, live in Jefferson, Mississippi. They have three sons: Quentin, Benjamin ("Benjy"), and Jason, along with a daughter named Candace ("Caddy"). The family also employs a black servant, Dilsey Gibson, who lives on their property with her family. Early in their childhoods, the Compson children's grandmother ("Damuddy") dies. Caddy climbs a tree to look inside her grandmother's room and observe her funeral, while her brothers look up at her mud-soaked underwear. Later, when Benjy is five years old, his parents realize he's severely mentally disabled and incapable of speech; his mother, who originally named him after her brother Maury, renames him Benjamin.
In 1909, Caddy has sex with a boy named Dalton Ames. Quentin, distraught, attempts to defend her honor. He proposes a joint suicide with Caddy, tries to fight Ames, and tells his father that he, not Ames, had sex with his sister. The Compsons send Quentin to Harvard University, paying for his tuition by selling Benjy's share of the family's land. His parents then take Caddy, now pregnant, to French Lick, Indiana, where she meets a banker named Herbert Head. Caddy and Head marry in 1910, and Head promises Jason Compson a job at his bank. However, Caddy's father reveals that she was pregnant before meeting Head, leading Head to divorce her.
On June 2, 1910, Quentin plans to kill himself. After buying flat irons, he meets a young Italian girl who speaks no English at a bakery and tries to return her home, only for her brother to interpret him as a kidnapper. He reports Quentin to the authorities, who make him pay a fine. Later, Quentin attacks his boorish classmate Gerald Bland, who reminds him of Dalton Ames, but Bland knocks him unconscious. Quentin returns to his dorm to clean himself up, then uses the irons to drown himself in the Charles River. Caddy names her daughter Quentin ("Miss Quentin") after her late brother.
Over the following years, Mr. Compson dies from alcoholism, leaving Jason and his mother to run the house. Roskus, Dilsey's husband, also dies. Benjy's former plot of land, sold to pay for Quentin's tuition, becomes a golf course. Benjy is castrated after chasing a schoolgirl he believes to be Caddy. Caddy leaves Miss Quentin with Jason and her mother, but they refuse to let Caddy live with them. Instead, Caddy sends them money every month, which Jason keeps for himself.
Most of the novel takes place over Easter weekend in 1928. On Good Friday, Jason torments Miss Quentin, whom he blames for costing him the job at Head's bank, and unsuccessfully uses Caddy's money to short-sell cotton futures. On Holy Saturday, Benjy celebrates his 33rd birthday. Dilsey's grandson Luster looks after him while searching for a quarter so he can attend a traveling carnival; he ultimately receives one from Miss Quentin. That night, Miss Quentin steals Jason's money. She then escapes the Compson house by climbing down the same tree Caddy climbed as a child. On Easter, Dilsey takes her family and Benjy to a black church, where they listen to a sermon from Reverend Shegog. Meanwhile, Jason attempts to chase after Miss Quentin, who has left town with a man from the carnival. After catching up with the carnival in the nearby town of Mottson, Jason provokes a fight with one of the workers and injures himself in the confrontation. Having failed to find Miss Quentin, he hires a black man to drive him home. Back in Jefferson, Luster takes Benjy to the town cemetery, but travels the wrong way around a Confederate monument in the town square. Jason returns to find Benjy crying over this disruption to his routine; he intervenes and takes Benjy the right way.
Style and structure
The Sound and the Fury is divided into four chapters of roughly equal length. Like Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway, the first three chapters are written as stream-of-consciousness internal monologues, each covering a single day. Although the plot of the novel is revealed nonlinearly, the events of each individual day are told chronologically.
The four chapters show a progression of how the family relates to Caddy. The first chapter focuses on Caddy's childhood, the second on her adolescence, and the third on her adulthood. The fourth chapter shows her absence from the family and the family's decay without her. Critic Victor Strandberg argues the novel is structured after Beethoven's Eroica: Sections 1 and 4 are heroic, section 2 is a funeral march, and section 3 is a satirical scherzo.
Part 1: April 7, 1928
The first chapter is narrated by Benjy, a mentally disabled man who does not distinguish memories of his past from his present. Although the chapter is set in 1928, it focuses on Benjy's memories of events prior to June 1910, especially his sister Caddy's wedding, his mother's decision to rename him, and his earliest memories from the day Damuddy died. Each time the narrative returns to Damuddy's death day, those memories resume chronologically where they left off; the chapter ends as Benjy remembers falling asleep with Caddy that night.
Benjy uses short, direct sentences. He has a limited vocabulary of around 500 words, mostly for concrete objects, which forces him to use circumlocution and invent compound words. Benjy himself is mute, but he can relay complex grammar and vocabulary from other characters' speech, even when he does not understand what they mean. However, he exclusively punctuates quoted dialog with periods, flattening speakers' emphasis and emotions. He almost exclusively uses the verb "said", even when this leads to repetition; on one page, he repeats the phrase "Luster said" ten times. Benjy sometimes interweaves separate conversations as though they took place simultaneously. If he does not know who said a line of a dialog, he reports the words without quotation marks or attribution.