Sound and the Fury, The, is an early novel by the American author William Faulkner. The novel, published in 1929, is noted for its experimental storytelling techniques.
As in 13 of his other novels and many of his stories, Faulkner set The Sound and the Fury in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. He modeled this county on the real Lafayette County and its county seat of Oxford (called Jefferson by Faulkner). Like much of Faulkner’s fiction, The Sound and the Fury portrays the decline of the traditional white aristocratic society in the South during the early 1900’s.
Faulkner wrote The Sound and the Fury in four sections. Each is set on one day but treats the concerns and thoughts of characters over a 30-year period. The first three sections are narrated by brothers in the Compson family—the severely intellectually disabled 33-year-old Benjy; Quentin, a suicidal Harvard University freshman obsessed by his sister, Caddy; and Jason, the youngest and most cynical and money-loving of the brothers. The fourth section is written in a traditional third-person voice and focuses on the family’s Black cook, Dilsey. Faulkner contrasts Dilsey’s compassion and patience with the moral and mental deficiencies of the white Compsons.
Each of the three personally narrated sections employs techniques associated with “interior narration,” in which memories, sensations, and thoughts flow through a character’s mind. Quentin’s section is the most difficult and complex. The section deals with Quentin’s thoughts as well as the code of Southern honor and his sister’s loose sexual behavior.
The book’s title comes from a line in Macbeth, a tragedy by the English playwright William Shakespeare. Near the end of that play, the title character Macbeth comments that life “… is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
See also Faulkner, William.
