The Sound and the Fury
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First published on 7 October 1929, The Sound and the Fury traces the decline of the Compson family, once prominent in the imagined Southern town of Jefferson, Mississippi. Its story unfolds through four sections, moving between the troubled consciousnesses of the brothers Benjy, Quentin and Jason, before turning to the family’s Black servant, Dilsey. At the centre of their fractured lives is Caddy Compson, whose absence and memory shape the novel as powerfully as her presence. Through shifting voices, broken chronology and the intricate movement of memory, Faulkner reveals a family struggling beneath the weight of its history, its resentments and the passing of the old Southern order.
A landmark of literary Modernism, the novel transforms the stream-of-consciousness technique into an extraordinary exploration of time, grief, love and the disintegration of family and tradition. Its demanding structure is inseparable from its emotional force: the past continually intrudes upon the present, while each narrator offers a different and incomplete understanding of the same world. Among Faulkner’s most celebrated works, The Sound and the Fury remains one of the defining novels of twentieth-century American literature.
From the book
“It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed.”
— William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
On The Sound and the Fury
“The Sound and the Fury is insane and monstrous and terrible, but so is the life that it mirrors.”
— Lyle Saxon, New York Herald Tribune, 13 October 1929