The Sound and the Fury

THE SOUND AND THE FURY, Faulkner's fourth novel (1929), is his first true masterpiece. Depicting the decline of the once aristocratic Compson family, the novel is composed of four stream-of-consciousness narratives, each told by a different character with his or her own way of relating events. The first is sweet, gentle Benjy Compson, who at the Christlike age of 33 is severely retarded, writing in an elliptical, time-free, sometimes obscure style. (He describes two men playing golf as: "They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit.") Then the narrative moves back 18 years, to 1910, and is supplied by Benjy's brother Quentin, a student at Harvard about to commit suicide, who is obsessed with his sister, Caddy. The story returns to the present--1928--with the voice of Jason, the third Compson brother, a cruel and rapacious man who reveals certain family secrets that have been hinted at in the other sections, and introduces Caddy's almost grown daughter, also named Quentin. The bulk of the fourth and final section revolves around Dilsey, the black woman who has been a Compson family servant for much of her life. THE SOUND AND THE FURY was Faulkner's own favorite novel, primarily, he says, because it is his "most splendid failure." But many consider it to be his finest work.