The Sound and the Fury

Author - William Faulkner ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Paperback Book item from Vintage was reviewed on 16-Oct-2008.

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1) Paperback Book The Sound and the Fury by Vintage. This is William Faulkner´s fourth book and considered by many to be one of the greatest pieces of literature ever written...and after reading this book and writing this review I share those sentiments. And yet, when you listen to Faulkner describe his depiction into the decline of the aristocratic Compson family, he considered it to be his best failure. The book comes at you in four sections with each being told by a different narrative...so let´s explore Faulkner´s best failure, shall we?

The first part we meet the thirty-something man child, Benjy Compson. Benjy has flashbacks of the earliest events in the novel and is the key to the book´s title. Benjy has a simple vocabulary...he uses short words and forms basic sentences. While most of his memories revolve around his sister Caddy, it is a memory he has of her at an early age that establishes her character in the second part. He does recall other key events in his life: His name was changed from Maury to Benjamin, his brother Quentin´s self-inflicted death, and an event later that led to Benjy being castrated.

The second part takes place eighteen years earlier than Benjy´s section, and does a splendid job of developing the story...this section is from Quentin Compson´s perspective. It takes place the day of Quentin´s death while he is wandering around Boston. He is a student at Harvard University...and like his brother Benjy...he too, is preoccupied with the past and has frequent flashbacks...yet the differences between the two are easily apparent. Benjy´s flashback are mainly general impressions, while Quentin´s are abstract and delve into the reasoning behind the character´s motives.

The third part is told from Jason Compson´s perspective, the third of the Compson brothers and takes place during Good Friday. Unlike Benjy and Quentin, Jason has few flashbacks and focuses mainly on the present day. Jason bears witness to just how far down the Compson family sunk. His dark humor is cruel...he complains and his scheming is never-ending - Jason is the polar opposite of Quentin.

The fourth section doesn´t really have a voice, but if such a label is needed, one can call it Dilsey´s Section since she is the predominant character. This section is set entirely in the present day, on Easter Sunday. There are two main events in this section: Jason chasing stolen money and insulting a man in Mottson...and Dilsey´s attendance at an Easter church service, where a preacher delivers a sermon that instills in Dilsey a sense of impending doom for the Compson family.

Such a magnificent failure Faulkner has written...even when the story of this tragedy is told, we are allowed more glimpses into the decline of the Compson family...both from the family´s aristocratic history and in the years following their decline. The Sound and the Fury does a masterful job depicting four separate narratives telling the tale of the tragic lore of a once affluent family.¤

2) Paperback Book The Sound and the Fury by Vintage. Incontestable Fact: Any book that can´t be understood without the aid of the author explaining it or some kind of synopsis derived from the author´s explaination is a failure.

The truth is, only Faulkner himself understands this story. Even college perfessors rely on aids to teach this book.

Many of us down here on the 1 and 2 star level have said that this book is only regarded as a classic because of its stream of conscienceness style and we´re absolutely right. I personally think the stream of conscienceness is a brilliant idea but wasted here on a mundane concept.

I take issue with the fact that Faulkner says this is a story about two fallen women, when the story does not focus on the two women in question, but rather on the way they have effected those around them. It would seem that Faulkner doesn´t understand his own story.

If you don´t like books that can only be mildly apprecciated in retrospect, don´t read this book. If mentally ill people depress you, don´t read this book. If suicidal people depress you, don´t read this book. If constantly cynical biggets depress you, don´t read this book. If, like me, you´re a southerner who can´t stand to read southern dialect, don´t read this book. If, in general, you don´t like reading about disfunctional families, don´t read this book.

The only people who enjoy this book only claim to like this book, which is a testiment to their snobbery. People will not say anything against this book for fear of appearing uneducated and/or uncultured.

Do not waste your precious time by reading this book. Trust me, you will be the wiser.¤

3) Paperback Book The Sound and the Fury by Vintage. This book is surely an American classic from one of our quintessential American novelists, but it is best appreciated by literature majors with an entire semester available to study it. Faulkner´s use of literary devices like the unreliable narrator and stream-of-consciousness prose is highly compelling, with great results from fractured personality types like the mentally handicapped (Benjy), the disturbed (Quentin), and the hate-filled (Jason). Faulkner was a brilliant observer of the deteriorating state of Southern culture and values during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras, represented here by the pathetic collapse of the once-noble Compson family.

But this book is an excessively difficult and often exasperating read. I am not penalizing the book because I chose not to spend an entire semester studying it, because maybe I´m not giving it the credit it deserves. But on the other hand, Faulkner loses points for obfuscation, with characters not being properly introduced, multiple characters with the same names (like the two Quentins), and shifting time streams and points of view. Of course, all of these were intentional by Faulkner to create a surreal and emotional effect. But it sure is difficult to follow the story. Nonetheless, this book is still a classic, but ask yourself how much of a struggle you enjoy with your reading experience. [~doomsdayer520~]¤

4) Paperback Book The Sound and the Fury by Vintage. William Faulkner compels his readers to think, and sometimes to think mightily. This is one of his books that underscores mightily. The reader will be richly rewarded in availing himself of this masterpiece.¤

5) Paperback Book The Sound and the Fury by Vintage. The Sound and the Fury / 0-679-73224-1

Difficult and complex, The Sound and the Fury details the slow decline of the American South through the metaphor of the fictional Compson family. This book is so complex and rewarding because Faulkner introduces the concept of the unreliable narrator - the book is alternately narrated by three brothers, one mentally retarded, another depressed and suicidal, and the third arrogant, cruel, and vicious. Because of this, our impressions of the Compson family (and of the pivotal sister, Caddy, who is never given her own voice) must emerge from these flawed narratives, attempting to find common ground between all three, and realizing that even this common ground is suspect.

Is sister Caddy a sweet, noble girl, an angel who cares for her mentally retarded brother and eases his troubled passage through childhood? Or is she a promiscuous, wanton young woman who commits incest with her suicidal older brother because he wants desperately to share her "shame" with her, in an attempt to save her? Or is she a stupid, easily manipulated woman, who is tricked by her cruel younger brother into giving him guardianship of her daughter and sending "support" money for her which he then steals for himself? In the end, we suspect that Caddy is none of these things, and is simply a woman, with all the complex motives and neuroses that plague her brothers. It is, in a way, a shame that Caddy - as the lynchpin of the Compson family - is not given a voice of her own, but we also understand that we would not be able to trust her any more than the mental ramblings and confused remembrances of her brothers.¤

6) Paperback Book The Sound and the Fury by Vintage. First published in 1929, Faulkner created his "heart´s darling," the beautiful and tragic Caddy Compson, whose story Faulkner told through separate monologues by her three brothers--the idiot Benjy, the neurotic suicidal Quentin and the monstrous Jason.¤

7) Paperback Book The Sound and the Fury by Vintage. 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.

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 13-Nov-2008, 06797322419780679732242, 690-870-410-5X0-670-340-8

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