The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

I first read The Sound and the Fury in high school, more than 40 years ago. The stream-of-consciousness, the multiple narrators, scenes out of chronological order, and the story emerging gradually rather than being presented whole, thrilled me. The novel opened up for me an entirely new understanding of what literature could be. With a helpful guide to work through the complexities, I was smitten. I read several others of his novels shortly after, As I Lay Dying, for a college course, Light in August on my own, and I read several others of the modernists at the same time: Joyce, Woolf, Dos Passos, Kafka, Marquez. Faulkner opened up a literary path for me that I’ve been on ever since.

Last month, I read Absalom, Absalom! and was once again excited by Faulkner’s genius: a great story ingeniously told. Because I enjoyed it, and because the novel’s main narrator, Quentin Compson also appears in The Sound and the Fury, I decided it was time to re-read my high school crush, as it were. Much of it I remembered very well. A few things surprised me. I loved it just as before.

The Sound and the Fury written in 1929, mostly takes place over Easter weekend in 1928, April 6, 7 and 8, although much of the action occurs thirty or so years earlier, and one entire section is set on June 2, 1910, the end of Quentin Compson’s year at Harvard. Absalom, Absalom!, written in 1936 is set just before and in the middle of Quentin’s year at Harvard, 1909 and 1910, although the story spreads across the nineteenth century, making Absalom, Absalom! something of a prequel to the earlier novel.

The first chapter, “April Seventh, 1928” takes place on Holy Saturday and is narrated by the Compson family’s youngest son, Benjy; it’s also his thirty-third birthday. Benjy is mentally disabled. He cannot speak. He requires constant supervision by a household servant. He is highly emotional, and he cannot readily distinguish between present-day events and memories. As his narrative moves through the events of the Saturday in 1928 (he walks the grounds of the house, he walks to a nearby river, he has his birthday cake at the house) his story constantly slips back into earlier episodes in his life, particularly bittersweet memories of his older sister, Candace, called Caddy, who left home eighteen years earlier.

Because Faulkner reproduces Benjy’s fractured mental state as he has Benjy narrate this section of the novel, this first chapter can be daunting. (The title, The Sound and the Fury refers to a line from Macbeth where Shakespeare describes life as “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”) The language is simple, because Benjy has a limited vocabulary, but disparate episodes from throughout his life flow together and collide, sometimes marked by a switch from regular type to italics. And Faulkner has us simply follow Benjy’s thoughts without any attention to exposition. At first we don’t know who these people are or their relationships or when the scene occurred. We’re not even clear at first why Benjy’s mind works the way it does. All of this does eventually become clear, Faulkner gives us all the necessary clues, but finding the sense takes careful, patient, reading.

Further complicating the text is that several character’s share the same name. This was one of the helpful aides that my high school teacher provided, so I’ll share it here, too.

Benjy reacts emotionally when he hears golfers calling “Caddy!” because the word makes him think of his sister, Caddy. He begins to cry at the sound, because she’s gone, and he usually slips into re-living some old memory of her.

When Benjy was born he was named for his mother’s brother, Maury. Later, when the family realized Benjy’s disability, they changed his name from Maury to Benjamin so as not to dishonor the uncle, who also lives in the house.

Similarly, there are two Quentin’s. In the earlier scenes, Quentin is Benjy’s older brother who goes to Harvard and who we know from Absalom, Absalom! In later episodes, the Quentin referred to is Caddy’s teenaged daughter, who is being raised by the family.

And, there are two Jasons: the father, Jason III, and the son, Jason IV who is Quentin, Caddy, and Benjy’s brother.

It’s also helpful to know a little about the second family that comprises this novel: the servants. Dilsey is the matriarch housekeeper, cook, child-raiser, and nurse. Her son, T. P., is Benjy’s caretaker when Benjy is young. A grandson, Luster, is Benjy’s caretaker when Benjy is older. There’s also a daughter named Frony.

The second chapter, June Second, 1910, is narrated by Quentin Compson. This chapter takes place on a day near the end of the Harvard school year. On this day, Quentin skips school and wanders around the town. At the end of the day he will commit suicide by jumping off a bridge into the Charles River with flatirons in his pockets. This chapter is also narrated in stream-of-consciousness style but Quentin’s mind isn’t disordered the way Benjy’s is, so it’s much easier to follow, although, as you would imagine from a character contemplating suicide, Quentin’s thoughts, too, are often jumbled with emotions and significant memories.

Chapter three is titled April Sixth, 1928, so this is Good Friday of the Easter weekend, the day before the events narrated by Benjy. Now our narrator is Jason (the son). The first person narration is entirely straight-forward. Jason is a grown man. Following the death of his father and with Quentin and Caddy gone eighteen years earlier, Jason has become the man of the house. He humors his hypochondriac mother. He attempts to discipline Caddy’s seventeen year-old daughter, Quentin. Dilsey and Luster and Benjy are also in the house.

Chapter four takes place on Easter Sunday and is titled, April Eighth, 1928. I had mis-remembered that this chapter was narrated by Dilsey, but it isn’t. Rather, this chapter, significantly shorter than the others, is told in third-person. Although Dilsey’s day of getting the family’s breakfast together and then attending the Easter service at her church is a major portion of the content, this chapter is really more of a continuation and the conclusion of Jason’s conflict with Quentin that we had from the preceding chapter.

In fact, the novel could easily be read as three interconnected short stories rather than a through-written novel. There is Benjy’s story, which introduces the family situation but really focuses on his internal state. There is Quentin’s very different story from eighteen years earlier. And then a third story of Jason: his pride, his thwarted destiny, his inability to control his family, his cruelty and conniving, and then a final comeuppance when Quentin steals the money that Jason has been hoarding from his own savings and that Caddy had been sending for her daughter’s care, and runs off with a drummer from the traveling show that had been visiting town.

It’s interesting that Faulkner does not give Caddy her own voice in the novel. She drives the action for the other characters: Benjy’s love for Caddy and heartbreak at her absence; Quentin’s defense of Caddy’s “honor” and despair when she loses it; Jason’s calculated manipulation of Caddy’s attempts to stay connected to her daughter Quentin. But, like the character of Percival in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Caddy’s portrait is presented through the ways her life is reflected in others, rather than directly through herself.

The book is surprisingly funny: the mother’s constant refrain that the family will all be better off when she’s gone, the inability of anyone to realize that Benjy’s fascination with the golf course has nothing to do with the golfers but rather with the fact that they keep calling out his beloved sister’s name. The characters are interesting and rich, Jason especially, who is delightfully pompous and wicked. It’s Southern Gothic, surely, and, like Absalom, Absalom! tells the story of the destruction and demise of a family: the Sutpen’s in Absalom, Absalom! the Compson’s in The Sound and the Fury.

I also want to note that the convoluted telling of the novel is part of its attraction. It’s difficult, yes, but it’s actually fun. It’s the satisfaction of solving a puzzle. As the realizations come to you, each one sparks a little ping of pleasure. I felt drawn in to the story, engaged with it, working for it, which honored me as a reader. It could have been simply told, but a standard telling wouldn’t immerse us in the story and the characters, and even into the minds of the characters, the way that Faulkner’s creative telling does.

This is truly one of the most remarkable works of twentieth-century literature. Faulkner was awarded the Nobel prize in 1949.