The Sound and the Fury

William Faulkner published The Sound and the Fury in 1929. He was thirty-two years old and had published two novels that went nowhere. He later said that when he began this one he decided to stop worrying about publication — to write the book he needed to write without thinking about an audience. He wrote it five times over, he said, and never felt he got it right.

The novel follows the decline of the Compson family in Jefferson, Mississippi, over roughly thirty years. The Compsons were once the preeminent family in their community; by the novel's present they are dispersed, diminished, and broken. The title is from Macbeth: "It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing." The first narrator is Benjy Compson, who is intellectually disabled and cannot tell time.

The formal structure is the achievement. The novel has four sections:

• April 7, 1928: Benjy's section. Stream-of-consciousness from a narrator who cannot distinguish past from present; scenes from different decades of the family's life cascade without chronological markers. The difficulty is real; the difficulty is the point.
• June 2, 1910: Quentin's section. The day Quentin Compson kills himself at Harvard. His consciousness is more articulate than Benjy's and more fragmented; his obsession with his sister Caddy's sexuality and his family's honor fills his mind as he moves toward death.
• April 6, 1928: Jason's section. Jason is the remaining Compson brother, a bitter, racist, miserly man. His narration is the most conventionally readable — he is vicious but coherent — and the most morally repugnant.
• April 8, 1928 (Easter Sunday): The only section in third person; centered on Dilsey, the Black woman who has been the family's servant and its functional adult for decades.

Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in 1949. When he accepted it, he said the writer must write about the human heart in conflict with itself, because that is the only thing worth writing about.

Caddy Compson — the sister around whom the entire novel orbits, though she has no section of her own and is not present in the novel's present timeline. Every brother's section is, fundamentally, about Caddy: about her sexuality, her fall from the family's idea of purity, her departure. She is the most important absent character in American literature.

Benjy Compson — intellectually disabled, thirty-three years old in the novel's present, unable to tell time. His section is the most demanding to read: memories flood in based on sensory triggers (the smell of trees, a sound, a physical sensation) without chronological order. The difficulty is exactly the difficulty of inhabiting a consciousness organized by sensation rather than narrative.

Quentin Compson — the eldest brother, a Harvard student obsessed with honor, the Southern past, and Caddy's loss of purity. He is one of Faulkner's finest creations: a man destroyed by his own categories, unable to live in a world where the categories he was raised on no longer apply. He kills himself on June 2, 1910; his section is his last day.

Jason Compson — the third brother, who stayed in Jefferson, who kept the family's money (what remained of it), who is mean in every sense. His narration is bitter, funny, and deeply unreliable. He is Faulkner's portrait of what the Southern patriarch becomes when the social structure that gave him meaning collapses.

Dilsey Gibson — the Black servant who has held the family together for decades, who sees clearly what the white Compsons cannot see, who remains dignified while they collapse. Her section — the only one in third person — is the novel's most direct and, for many readers, its most moving. Faulkner's Nobel speech's phrase "endure and prevail" is often connected to Dilsey.

No. 1 · Benjy's section. The first section asks the reader to inhabit a consciousness organized by sensation rather than time. A flash of a specific color, a sound, a smell: each triggers a memory that Benjy experiences as present. Reading it on first pass requires accepting confusion and reading for cumulative impression rather than sequential understanding. On second read, having learned the family's chronology from later sections, Benjy's section becomes heartbreaking: the love he had for Caddy, and the loss of her, is all that his consciousness holds.

No. 2 · Quentin and the shadow. Quentin spends his last day trying to destroy his watch — trying to escape time, which he has decided he cannot live inside. He fights with the shadow he casts. He tries to hold onto a pure South that never existed. Faulkner's rendering of a consciousness dissolving under the weight of its own constructions — unable to inhabit the present because the past it was trained on is false — is one of modernism's finest achievements.

No. 3 · Dilsey in church. The novel's fourth section: Easter Sunday. Dilsey takes Benjy to the Black church, where the preacher delivers a sermon. The sermon section — the preacher's voice, the congregation's response, Dilsey's tears — is the novel's most direct statement of what endurance means, what it looks like in a body, what persists when everything else has broken. Faulkner renders it with complete respect and no condescension.

Reading aid: Faulkner wrote an "Appendix: Compson, 1699–1945" in 1945 for a collection. It summarizes the family history and clarifies what happened to each character. Many readers recommend reading the Appendix first; others argue against it. At minimum, read it after completing the novel.

Read this if you are…

• A reader willing to accept genuine difficulty in exchange for a genuinely different reading experience. The first section is hard; the novel rewards the effort.
• Anyone interested in modernist fiction: Faulkner's stream-of-consciousness is as demanding as Joyce and more emotionally immediate.
• Readers who want to understand the American South — not its mythology but its psychology, what it felt like to be formed by a set of values that were already false.

Skip it if you are…

• Not prepared for the Benjy section. If non-linear stream-of-consciousness is not a mode you can inhabit, this is not the right Faulkner to start with. Try As I Lay Dying (which has multiple narrators in shorter chapters) or Light in August (which is more conventionally structured).

• Read the Appendix before or after, not during. It provides the family history chronologically; reading it first makes the Benjy section more navigable. Reading it after is more revelatory. Your choice.
• Accept the Benjy section. Don't try to decode it on first pass. Read it as you'd listen to music: for tone, image, and emotional weight rather than sequential sense. The chronology becomes clear later.
• The color of Caddy's muddy drawers. Benjy associates Caddy with the smell of trees. Keep the sensory triggers in mind when reading his section — they are the structural markers.
• Jason is funny. His bitterness and self-pity are comic in ways Faulkner intends. If you're not laughing a little during Jason's section, you're reading him too grimly.
• Dilsey is the moral center. Her section is where Faulkner's sympathy is most visible.

• William Faulkner — As I Lay Dying (1930). The next Faulkner novel, written in six weeks: multiple first-person narrators, the same Yoknapatawpha County. More accessible formally; equally dark.
• Toni Morrison — Beloved (1987). Morrison wrote her doctoral dissertation on Faulkner; Beloved's formal difficulty and its handling of traumatic memory are in direct dialogue with Faulkner's technique.
• James Joyce — Ulysses (1922). The modernist companion: stream-of-consciousness in a single day, a single city. Faulkner read Joyce; the comparison shows what he learned and what he chose differently.
• Flannery O'Connor — A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955). The Southern Gothic companion: shorter, darker, funnier. O'Connor and Faulkner are the two essential voices of literary Southern Gothic.

1. The novel's first section is narrated by Benjy, who cannot distinguish past from present. What is Faulkner arguing by choosing this narrator first? What can Benjy's perspective see that the other narrators cannot?
2. Caddy has no section of her own. Every section is about her from the outside. What effect does this create? Why might Faulkner have made this choice?
3. Quentin kills himself trying to hold onto a vision of Southern honor and purity that he knows is false. What has he been trained to value? Why can't he live in the world as it is?
4. Jason is the most coherent narrator and the most morally repugnant. Is Faulkner using Jason's coherence to make an argument about a certain kind of person?
5. Dilsey endures. What does she endure? What does Faulkner mean by "endure and prevail"? Does the novel — written by a white Southerner — render Dilsey with full complexity?
6. The title is from Macbeth: "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Does the novel affirm this nihilism, or does it argue against it?
7. Faulkner said he wrote this novel five times and never got it right. Does anything in the novel feel unresolved or unfinished to you?