The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner’s fourth novel, is his first true masterpiece,

and many consider it to be his finest work. It was Faulkner’s own favorite
novel, primarily, he says, because it is his “most splendid failure.” Depicting
the decline of the once-aristocratic Compson family, the novel is divided into
four parts, each told by a different narrator.

The Story
Section 1: “April Seventh, 1928.”

The first section is told from the point of

   Through the fence, between the curling
view of Benjy Compson, a thirty-three-
flower spaces, I could see them hitting.
year-old idiot, and recounts via They were coming toward where the flag
flashbacks the earliest events in the was and I went along the fence. Luster was
novel. As an idiot, Benjy is the key to hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They
the novel’s title, which alludes to took the flag out, and they were hitting.
Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth. For the Then they put the flag back and they went
to the table, and he hit and the other hit.
most part, his language is simple- Then they went on, and I went along the
sentences are short, vocabulary basic. fence. Luster came away from the flower
Reading this section is profoundly tree and we went through the fence and
difficult, however, because the idiot has they stopped and we stopped and I looked
through the fence while Luster was hunting
no concept of time or place-sensory
in the grass.
stimuli in the present bring him back to from The Sound and the Fury
another time and place in his past,
instantly and without warning (except for a change in typeface from Roman to italic).
Most of his memories concern his sister, Caddy, who is in some ways the central
character in the novel. Benjy’s earliest depicted memory, from 1898 (when Benjy was
three years old), establishes the essence of her character-the children are ignorant of the
death of their grandmother, “Damuddy,” and Caddy is the only Compson child brave
enough to climb the pear tree and look through the window at the funeral wake while
her brothers stand below, gazing up at her muddy drawers, which were soiled earlier
when they were playing in a creek adjoining the Compson estate.

Most of Benjy’s other memories also focus on Caddy, who alone among the Compsons
genuinely cared for Benjy. Key memories regarding Caddy include a time when she
uses perfume (1905), when she loses her virginity (1909), and her wedding (1910).
Benjy also recalls his name change (from Maury to Benjamin) in 1900, his brother
Quentin’s suicide in 1910, and the sequence of events at the gate which lead to his being
castrated, also in 1910.

Reading Benjy’s section is difficult, but it is not impossible. First, note that there are
two characters named “Maury”-Benjy before 1900 and Mrs. Compson’s brother, “Uncle
Maury” Bascomb-and there are two Quentins-Benjy’s suicidal brother and Caddy’s
illegitimate daughter. Second, you can get some sense of the time by noting who is
taking care of Benjy. Three black servants take care of Benjy at different times: Versh
when Benjy is a small child, T.P. when Benjy is approximately 15 years old, and Luster
in the present, when Benjy is 33.

Section 2: “June Second, 1910.”

    When the shadow of the sash appeared
The second section recounts the story on the curtains it was between seven and
eight oclock and then I was in time again,
from Quentin Compson’s perspective.
hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and
Even though the present-day of this when Father gave it to me he said I give you
section is almost eighteen years prior to the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s
the present-day of Benjy’s section, it rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it
nevertheless follows roughly the to gain the reducto absurdum of all human
experience which can fit your individual
chronological development of the novel,
needs no better than it fitted his or his
for while many of Benjy’s recollections father’s. I give it to you not that you may
are of their early childhood, most of remember time, but that you might forget it
Quentin’s flashbacks record their now and then for a moment and not spend
adolescence, particularly Caddy’s all your breath trying to conquer it. Because
no battle is ever won he said. They are not
dawning sexuality.  Quentin’s section
even fought. The field only reveals to man
takes place on the day he commits his own folly and despair, and victory is an
suicide, and in the present we follow his illusion of philosophers and fools.
wanderings around Boston (he is a from The Sound and the Fury
student at Harvard University) as he
fastidiously prepares for death. Like Benjy, he too is obsessed with the past and
frequently lapses into flashbacks. Unlike the fairly discrete narratives of Benjy’s
multiple memories, however, Quentin’s are much more fragmentary-a repeated (and
usually italicized) word or phrase early in his section often recurs later with greater
detail and embellishment. Quentin’s flashbacks also are much more intellectual than
Benjy’s. Whereas Benjy records mainly sensual impressions, Quentin more often delves
into more abstract issues such as character motivation, guilt, honor, and sin.

He begins his section by contemplating time, even breaking the hands off his watch in a
futile attempt to “escape” time. Another minor obsession Quentin has throughout his
section is with shadows; the word “shadow” is repeated constantly throughout his
section (thus recalling Shakespeare’s image of a “walking shadow” in the soliloquy
alluded to by the novel’s title). Alone among the present-day Compsons, Quentin still
feels pride in his family’s noble and glorious past, but he recognizes that today nothing
remains of that past; it is mere shadow, and he is merely a “poor player” strutting and
fretting, powerless to achieve anything of serious importance. Part of Quentin’s mental
perturbation arises from his father’s deep and unswerving cynicism and nihilism; much
of his section is a sort of inner dialogue with his father, in which Quentin hopes to prove
his father wrong. In fact, his suicide may be just that-his escape from time-for Mr.
Compson has told Quentin that as time passes, Quentin will forget his horror, which is
unacceptable to Quentin because forgetting would render his horror meaningless, and so
he escapes time in the only way he can, by drowning himself.

The source of Quentin’s horror is Caddy. Hearkening back to antebellum views of

honor, Southern womanhood, and virginity, Quentin cannot accept his sister’s growing
sexuality, just as he cannot accept his father’s notion that “virginity” is merely an
invention by men. Most of his flashbacks concern directly his involvement in Caddy’s
sexual maturing, but ironically they depict also just how ineffectual Quentin is. In an
attempt to restore “honor” to Caddy and to the Compson family, for example, he
confronts Dalton Ames, who may be the man who impregnated Caddy, but Quentin is
easily overpowered by Ames-and in the present, when he mistakes a fellow student for
the adversary of his flashback, Quentin gets beat up. In another incident, Quentin
proposes a suicide pact with Caddy, but ultimately he cannot go through with it.
Section 3: “April Sixth, 1928.”
    Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say. I
says you’re lucky if her playing out of
Section three is told by the third
school is all that worries you. I says she
Compson brother, Jason, and is set on ought to be down there in that kitchen right
Good Friday. Unlike his brothers, Jason now, instead of up there in her room,
is much more focused on the present, gobbing paint on her face and waiting for
offering fewer flashbacks, though he six niggers that cant even stand up out of a
chair unless they’ve got a pan full of bread
does have a few and he refers frequently
and meat to balance them, to fix breakfast
to events in the past. The tone of Jason’s for her.
section is set instantly by the opening from The Sound and the Fury
sentence: “Once a bitch always a bitch,
what I say.” Jason is a sadist, and his grimly humorous section reveals just how low the
Compson family has sunk-from Quentin’s obsessions over heritage and honor and sin to
Jason’s near-constant cruelty, complaints, and scheming.

As earlier in the novel, this section reflects a rough chronological advancement-the

focus now is not on Caddy herself (though she does appear in a few flashbacks and she
often is the subject of Jason’s pointed remarks) but rather on her daughter, Quentin,
who came to live with the Compsons following Caddy’s divorce and who is now, like
Caddy in Quentin’s section, entering into adult sexuality. Much of Jason’s section is
about his trying to track her down when she skips school to be with a man associated
with the circus then in town, but for first-time readers of the novel, Jason’s section is
also probably when the difficulties of Benjy’s and Quentin’s sections begin to make
sense. Among the “discoveries” here are that Quentin drowned himself (the suicide
itself was not depicted in Quentin’s section), that Benjy is a “gelding,” that Caddy was
divorced and that her daughter, also named Quentin, has come to live with the
Compsons. Other things, too, are revealed more clearly: Mrs. Compson’s hypochondria,
Mr. Compson’s alcoholism and nihilism, and especially, Jason’s meanness and greed.
For years, Caddy has been sending money to her daughter, and since Mrs. Compson has
forbidden Caddy’s name from being mentioned in the house, she has likewise forbidden
her money. To overcome this hurdle, Jason gives Mrs. Compson duplicates of Caddy’s
checks (for Mrs. Compson to ceremoniously burn) while he cashes the actual checks
and pockets the money, giving little or none of it to his niece.

Section 4: “April Eighth, 1928.”

    In the midst of the voices and the hands
The fourth and final section is told from Ben sat, rapt in his sweet blue gaze. Dilsey
an omniscient viewpoint. It is sometimes sat bolt upright beside, crying rigidly and
known as “Dilsey’s Section” because of quietly in the annealment and the blood of
her prominence in this section, but she is the remembered Lamb.
from The Sound and the Fury
not the sole focus in this section-a long
sequence follows Jason as he pursues his
niece, who has stolen about $7,000 from him, to “Mottson.”

The focus here is entirely upon the present-day, Easter Sunday, and to that end, all
traces of Caddy, including her daughter and even the very mention of her name, have
been removed. The two main narratives presented in this section are fairly
straightforward: Jason’s pursuit of his stolen money and his inevitable come-uppance
when he insults the wrong man in Mottson; and Dilsey’s attendance at an Easter church
service, at which a preacher from St. Louis, Reverend Shegog, delivers a sermon which
stirs in Dilsey an epiphany of doom for the Compson family. As she says, following the
service, “I’ve seed de first en de last ... I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin.”

  As the novel ends, the two narratives again

The Lafayette County Courthouse with
Confederate Monument, 1930
left to right, post and tree, window and doorway and signboard each in its ordered
place.”
converge: Luster has secured permission to
drive Benjy to the graveyard, and both he and
Jason arrive at the courthouse square in
Jefferson at about the same time. But Luster
goes past a Confederate soldier on the
“wrong” side, which causes Benjy to start
crying. Jason approaches, hits Luster, and
tells him to take Benjy home. And thus, the
novel ends: “[Benjy’s] broken flower
drooped over Ben’s fist and his eyes were
empty and blue and serene again as cornice
and façade flowed smoothly once more from

Background
According to Faulkner, the story began with a vision of a little girl’s muddy drawers as
she climbed a tree to look at death while her brothers, lacking her courage, waited
below:

I tried first to tell it with one brother, and that wasn’t enough. That was Section One. I
tried it with another brother, and that wasn’t enough. That was Section Two. I tried the
third brother, because Caddy was still to me too beautiful and too moving to reduce her
to telling what was going on, that it would be more passionate to see her through
somebody else’s eyes, I thought. And that failed and I tried myself-the fourth section- to
tell what happened, and I still failed.[1]

Faulkner added a fifth attempt to tell Caddy Compson’s story in 1945, when he wrote
an “Appendix” to the novel to be included in The Portable Faulkner then being
assembled for Viking Press by Malcolm Cowley. “I should have done this when I wrote
the book,” Faulkner told Cowley. “Then the whole thing would have fallen into pattern
like a jigsaw puzzle when the magician’s wand touched it.” In the Appendix, titled
“Compson 1699-1945” (to resemble an obituary), Faulkner offers some additional
glimpses into Compson family lore, both from the clan’s aristocratic past and in the
years following the dates in the novel.

Before Faulkner wrote The Sound and the Fury, he had written a book which he thought
was to be the book that would make his name as a writer. He wrote his publisher, “I
have written THE book, of which those other things were but foals. I believe it is the
damdest best book you’ll look at this year, and any other publisher.” That manuscript
was Flags in the Dust, and it would not be published until eleven years after Faulkner’s
death.

The discouragement of having Flags turned down, and then severely cut by his friend
Ben Wasson into what would be published as Sartoris, apparently led Faulkner to begin
writing a book entirely for himself, and publishers be damned. That book, originally
titled “Twilight,” was The Sound and the Fury. Later, Faulkner would say it was the
novel he felt most “tender” toward because it had caused him “the most grief and
anguish.”

Structure, Technique, and Criticism

None of Faulkner’s novels has generated as much critical response as The Sound and
the Fury. Because of the sheer abundance of published criticism on the novel, not to
mention the vastly divergent opinions and interpretations of the novel, any effort here at
commentary on the novel must necessarily fall short.

Still, there are some things on which critics agree. Few dispute that the novel depicts a
“tragedy,” the decline of the Compson family. There is agreement too that much of the
novel is told in a stream-of-consciousness style, in which a character’s unadorned
thoughts are conveyed in a manner roughly equivalent to the way our minds actually
work. Themes critics continuously note in the novel are order, honor, sin. And nearly all
critics consider it a technical masterpiece for the way Faulkner incorporates four distinct
narrative modes in telling the story of a little girl with muddy drawers.

But as any great literary work should, The Sound and the Fury invites a number of
approaches, methods, and philosophies to those who would interpret it. Nearly every
reader agrees that Caddy Compson is a key, if not the key character in the novel, though
critics differ in how prominent her role should be. Much has been made, too, of the
religious backdrop of the story. The present-day setting of Easter has led some critics to
question whether Benjy is some ironic modern-day Christ figure-his age (thirty-three),
in particular, is suggestive of Christ at the time of his crucifixion. Still others view
parallels between Dilsey and the “suffering servant” of Isaiah.[2]