The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner is a classic of 20th-century literature and one of the most celebrated works of American literature. Set in the fictional town of Jefferson, Mississippi, in the early 20th century, the novel tells the story of the decline and fall of the Compson family, once a powerful and respected clan in the South. It uses the shifting perspectives of four Compson siblings to illustrate the decline of the once-proud family.
Faulkner's novel follows each of the Compson siblings in turn - Benjy, Quentin, Jason, and Caddy - and their individual stories as they all struggle to survive the decline of the family. The majority of the story is told "in the present" during the late 1920s and early 1930s, but flashbacks explore the family's past, beginning in the early 1900s.
Benjy, the slow-minded, 33-year-old brother, narrates the bulk of the novel from his limited perspective. He confuses past and present, conflates visual and auditory images, and often cannot distinguish between people and things. His narration, however, serves as an indirect commentary on the economic, social, and psychological repercussions of the American South's history of slavery and racism and the decline of the Compson family.
The second narrator, Quentin, is an emotionally disturbed 23-year-old college student struggling to keep up appearances. He searches desperately for something - some uncomplicated ideal - to help him order his chaotic world. He vacillates between a sense of inferiority and superiority, trying to reconcile the idea that his family "matter[s] more than all the other families in the world and count[s] less.” His chapters are told in the form of a lengthy soliloquy, intertwining his preoccupation with time and death and his obsessive need to protect the missing Caddy and restore some kind of moral order.
The most manipulative of the siblings is Jason, a cynical and selfish schemer who has become the family's sole source of income. His chapters are written from the point of view of a third-person omniscient narrator and reveal his contempt for the rest of the Compsons. Despite his pungent wit, his narrative reveals his own sense of ineffectuality, never being able to fully provide for his invalid mother and helpless sister, and instead turning to shady business deals.
Caddy, the only female, works outside the home and has to rescue her younger brothers from their own despair. Her own memories, captured in flashbacks, reveal her reaction to her brother's struggles, the misogyny she confronts in the townspeople, and her own despair over her waning sense of self-respect. Her character is a representative for a proud southern woman who, despite the odds, clings to a certain kind of integrity.
The Sound and the Fury is a highly acclaimed novel that discusses the complexities of identity, family, and morality in the 20th-century South. Faulkner's structure and use of multiple narrators not only capture the psychological complexity of his characters, but also suggests the exchange of stories to reveal the effects of time and social change. By featuring stories of a bygone era and a declining family, The Sound and the Fury articulates the agonies of being unable to maintain the dignity of the Southern past.
