The story
The Sound and the Fury, published in New York on October 7, 1929, is a novel by William Faulkner set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi. It tells the decline of the Compson family in four parts: Benjy, a thirty-three-year-old man with severe intellectual disability, in the sections of 1928; Quentin, a Harvard student who kills himself in 1910; his brother Jason, a bitter businessman; and a final section about the family's Black servant Dilsey. The first section jumps between memories without notice, which makes it famously hard to read.
Faulkner said the book began as a short story about the impressions of children, with a girl named Caddy climbing a tree to see inside a house, her muddy drawers visible to her brothers below. He retold the story four times to get closer to it. He took the title from Macbeth. The book borrowed from the stream of consciousness technique of Joyce, which Faulkner adapted to a Southern setting of fallen pride, race and memory. It sold poorly at first. In 1946 he added an appendix on the Compson family, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1949, which gave the book new recognition. Many critics now rank it among the greatest American novels.
Why it mattered
- The novel brought modernist methods, including shifting viewpoint and broken time, into American fiction.
- It established Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County as one of literature's most fully imagined places.
- It influenced Southern writers and later novelists such as Toni Morrison, who wrote part of her master's thesis on Faulkner.
- Its multiple narrators became a model for fiction about family memory and trauma.
Sources
- William Faulkner and The Sound and the Fury Library of America
- William Faulkner: Facts NobelPrize.org
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