false 10975 46 The ostensible subject of <I>The Sound and the Fury</I> is the dissolution of the Compsons, one of those august old Mississippi families that fell on hard times and wild eccentricity after the Civil War. But in fact what William Faulkner is really after in his legendary novel is the kaleidoscope of consciousness--the overwrought mind caught in the act of thought. His rich, dark, scandal-ridden story of squandered fortune, incest (in thought if not in deed), madness, congenital brain damage, theft, illegitimacy, and stoic endurance is told in the interior voices of three Compson brothers: first Benjy, the "idiot" man-child who blurs together three decades of inchoate sensations as he stalks the fringes of the family's former pasture; next Quentin, torturing himself brilliantly, obsessively over Caddy's lost virginity and his own failure to recover the family's honor as he wanders around the seedy fringes of Boston; and finally Jason, heartless, shrewd, sneaking, nursing a perpetual sense of injury and outrage against his outrageous family.<p> If Benjy's section is the most daringly experimental, Jason's is the most harrowing. "Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say," he begins, lacing into Caddy's illegitimate daughter, and then proceeds to hurl mud at blacks, Jews, his sacred Compson ancestors, his glamorous, promiscuous sister, his doomed brother Quentin, his ailing mother, and the long-suffering black servant Dilsey who holds the family together by sheer force of character.<p> Notoriously "difficult," <I>The Sound and the Fury</I> is actually one of Faulkner's more accessible works once you get past the abrupt, unannounced time shifts--and certainly the most powerful emotionally. Everything is here: the complex equilibrium of pre-civil rights race relations; the conflict between Yankee capitalism and Southern agrarian values; a meditation on time, consciousness, and Western philosophy. And all of it is rendered in prose so gorgeous it can take your breath away. Here, for instance, Quentin recalls an autumnal encounter back home with the old black possum hunter Uncle Louis: <blockquote> And we'd sit in the dry leaves that whispered a little with the slow respiration of our waiting and with the slow breathing of the earth and the windless October, the rank smell of the lantern fouling the brittle air, listening to the dogs and to the echo of Louis' voice dying away. He never raised it, yet on a still night we have heard it from our front porch. When he called the dogs in he sounded just like the horn he carried slung on his shoulder and never used, but clearer, mellower, as though his voice were a part of darkness and silence, coiling out of it, coiling into it again. WhoOoooo. WhoOoooo. WhoOooooooooooooooo. </blockquote> What Faulkner has created is a modernist epic in which characters assume the stature of gods and the primal family events resonate like myths. It is <I>The Sound and the Fury</I> that secures his place in what Edmund Wilson called "the full-dressed post-Flaubert group of Conrad, Joyce, and Proust." <I>--David Laskin</I> 1168289 1929 The Sound and the Fury total:16401|5:6455|4:4845|3:3049|2:1262|1:790| 16401 64116 23113 1390 2 18 false false Sun Jan 06 08:10:02 -0800 2008 Sun Jan 06 08:45:57 -0800 2008
On the other hand, it´s hard to deny that it´s a great book, if only from t...more...]]> 5 14 false false Fri Mar 21 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Mon Mar 03 07:40:11 -0800 2008 Mon Mar 03 07:40:11 -0800 2008 more...]]> 5 7 false false Thu Dec 01 00:00:00 -0800 2005 Sat Mar 31 15:48:15 -0700 2007 Sat Mar 31 16:04:06 -0700 2007 The Great Gatsby , William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury languishes as the stepchild of United States literature-it is there, but it is not heard. Faulkner's odd story of The Compson Family, an detailed, troubling, and honest allegorical represen...more...]]> 5 5 false false Sat Jul 05 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sun Jun 08 16:30:11 -0700 2008 Sat Jul 05 13:36:35 -0700 2008 self-absorption, alcoholism, hypochondria, unwed-motherhood, sarcasm, cruelty, suicide....a perfectly average family! You might recognize some behaviors! ....oh and did I mention castration?

Faulkner used the Compson family tragedies to illustrate what...more...]]> 5 4 false false Thu Oct 01 00:00:00 -0700 1998 Fri Mar 16 16:23:19 -0700 2007 Fri Mar 16 16:43:13 -0700 2007 more...]]> 3 5 false false Fri Aug 22 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sat Jul 19 03:57:07 -0700 2008 Fri Aug 22 12:13:52 -0700 2008
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So let me begin with a note here - I'm currently on a two-week vacation in the Florida Keys, on a chartered catamaran, doing some snorkeling and writing and research for another book. But there's an awful lot of down-time, so I've been doing an awful lot of reading, a...more...]]> 5 3 false false Fri Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Thu Aug 14 14:07:21 -0700 2008 Tue Aug 19 15:35:08 -0700 2008 more...]]> 5 2 false false Wed Dec 10 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Sun Jul 13 04:20:03 -0700 2008 Wed Dec 10 13:52:42 -0800 2008 Quentin Compson, The Sound and the Fury

Having read one Faulkner book already—Light in August— I thought I knew what I was in for. About twenty pages into this one though, I was completely ...more...]]> 4 2 false false Thu Jun 19 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Tue Jun 17 15:19:05 -0700 2008 Sat Jun 21 15:26:30 -0700 2008 more...]]> 2 2 false true Wed Apr 09 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Fri May 30 21:34:17 -0700 2008 Fri May 30 21:35:11 -0700 2008 more...]]> 5 2 false false Wed Apr 01 00:00:00 -0800 1992 Tue Aug 21 07:08:16 -0700 2007 Tue Aug 21 07:32:59 -0700 2007 more...]]> 5 2 false false Tue Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2006 Thu Jun 07 15:09:54 -0700 2007 Sun Apr 13 20:23:51 -0700 2008 more...]]> 4 2 false false Sun Oct 01 00:00:00 -0700 2006 Wed May 30 11:18:47 -0700 2007 Fri Jun 01 10:39:09 -0700 2007 more...]]> 0 4 false false Tue Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Thu May 08 22:48:22 -0700 2008 Sat Jun 14 15:21:35 -0700 2008 more...]]> 5 2 false false Wed Aug 29 18:56:56 -0700 2007 Fri May 23 15:14:39 -0700 2008 more...]]> 0 1 false false Sun Feb 01 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Mon Mar 30 16:39:29 -0700 2009 Thu Apr 09 12:03:02 -0700 2009
While the language...more...]]> 1 3 false false Thu May 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Wed Jun 11 19:29:24 -0700 2008 Wed Jun 11 19:36:59 -0700 2008 more...]]> 1 1 false false Thu Mar 19 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Tue Mar 10 12:16:20 -0700 2009 Thu Mar 19 19:20:57 -0700 2009
I have read reviews and SparkNotes on the book, so I understand the premise and format. But what is the point...more...]]> 5 1 false false Mon Nov 24 13:22:58 -0800 2008 Mon Nov 24 13:23:12 -0800 2008 more...]]>