The Sound and the Fury: The Corrected Text

by William Faulkner

published

February 12th 1987 (first published 1929) by Vintage Books USA

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binding

Paperback, 378 pages

isbn

0394747747 (isbn13: 9780394747743)

description

The ostensible subject of The Sound and the Fury is the dissolution of the Compsons, one of those august old Mississippi families that fell o...more

[close] The ostensible subject of The Sound and the Fury 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.

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.

Notoriously "difficult," The Sound and the Fury 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 The Sound and the Fury that secures his place in what Edmund Wilson called "the full-dressed post-Flaubert group of Conrad, Joyce, and Proust." --David Laskin [close]

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Ryan rated it:

(review of isbn 0679732241)

01/06/08

recommended to Ryan by: Random House Top 100 Novels list
recommends it for: The autisic and those who want to prove their literary chops.

The first thing that comes to mind in regard to ¨The Sound and the Fury¨ is Eliot´s ¨a heap of broken images.¨ Deciphering TSTF is like reassembling a shattered mirror; difficult, and likely to end in pain.

On the other hand, it´s hard to deny that it´s a great book, if only from the standpoint of workmanship. The skill it took to create this piece, composed of so many seperate perspectives, confined to such a narrow and specific moments of time, makes me think of interlocking puzzles ...more The first thing that comes to mind in regard to ¨The Sound and the Fury¨ is Eliot´s ¨a heap of broken images.¨ Deciphering TSTF is like reassembling a shattered mirror; difficult, and likely to end in pain.

On the other hand, it´s hard to deny that it´s a great book, if only from the standpoint of workmanship. The skill it took to create this piece, composed of so many seperate perspectives, confined to such a narrow and specific moments of time, makes me think of interlocking puzzles carved from a single piece of wood or stone. Whether you like it or not, you have to admire the workmanship.

That being said, I believe that this book is so highly regarded for exactly the qualities that make it inaccessible to the majority of readers. If you have the patience to finish it, and the tools to decipher it, you become one of the select few, the literati elite. It´s regarded because it excludes. Unfortunately, many lovers of literature want writing to need decoding; they want layers of meaning inaccessible to the uninitiated. I am not one of those readers.

After all, once you do decode the book, once you´ve assembled the shattered mirror, is the image you see there really that unique or fascinating? I admit that I do have a certain sympathy for the characters in TSTF; I believe them. They feel real for me. However, it´s hard not to care about the characters after you´ve worked so hard to understand exactly what the hell is going on with them. You´ve already invested so much time with them that they´re practically family. It vaguely smacks of manipulation for an author to use such a device to get his readers invested with his characters.

Finally, I guess that my issue is not with Faulkner, a master of his craft who managed what is nearly impossible, to do some thing new in the field of writing. My issue is with the literature community, who chose to so highly esteem such a difficult nut to crack.

The Sound and the Fury; a masterpiece of form, and one of the most inaccessible books I´ve ever picked up. Again, it´s hard to argue with the quality of the book; I would recommend the book to very few readers, but I´ve still been moved to write a couple of hundred words about it....less

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Paul rated it:

(review of isbn 0679732241)

03/03/08

bookshelves: 20th-century-american-literature

Read in March, 2008

Somehow I earned a degree in English Lit w/o ever reading Faulkner. This was the first I’ve read of his and I can’t say enough about it. This book haunts you. Here’s the thing. You know that feeling you get when you hear a song or see a face that sparks some vague memory? This may have been a dream, or may have been something you saw in a movie. It might well have been something that never actually happened to you but was some fantasy or dream you had years ago. Maybe there’s even a phys...more Somehow I earned a degree in English Lit w/o ever reading Faulkner. This was the first I’ve read of his and I can’t say enough about it. This book haunts you. Here’s the thing. You know that feeling you get when you hear a song or see a face that sparks some vague memory? This may have been a dream, or may have been something you saw in a movie. It might well have been something that never actually happened to you but was some fantasy or dream you had years ago. Maybe there’s even a physical reaction? There has to be some common thread connecting all this, but damn it if you can put your finger on it. Still, it occupies your mind for an afternoon and inspires a train of thought you might not have had otherwise. That’s good right? Of course. That’s what you get with this book. Another said reading the Sound and the Fury was like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle with 50% of the pieces missing. I understand the point, but I don’t know if it’s exactly right. I don’t think there are any missing pieces; you just have to alter your expectation of what the completed puzzle will look like.

Faulkner is not just chronicling the “fall of the south.” I think the more important themes here have less to do with the post-reconstruction era/turn of the century south and more to do with a broader examination of time and history as it relates to the human/family experience. This is a book that unfolds like nothing I’ve ever read. You're sort of lost for the first 70-100 pages. Our understanding of time as a linear process will confound your experience with the first section of the book. Benjy’s narrative is difficult to be sure, but when the book is said and done is the most memorable and maybe the most important. In all the book is divided into four sections with four different viewpoints. We see through Benjy the past, present, and future existing on a plane rather than a line; Quinton's inability to accept time’s passing at all and his longing for the past (a past he was not necessarily a part of); Jason living only in the present and obsessing over an up to the minute existence; and finally Dilsey who seems the only member of the household with the ability to absorb the past as a part of the here and now and lives without fear the future. This theme is explored through style. The book is filled with sentences that have no beginning or end; some tete-a-tete with no indication given as to who’s speaking; and all throughout the punctuation isn't exactly wrong, but it certainly isn't correct. Lots of flashbacks, shifts in perspective, and often pages and pages with few if any paragraph breaks. Each character’s perception of time is understood through Faulkner’s experiment with language. It’s like reading a dream. The idea is to pull together all these moments, images, and broken bits of dialogue in order to get to the heart of that feeling I was talking about earlier. “where did this come from? why am I thinking about this? When will I be able to pull it together and figure it out?” you might not get there but it’s heartening to try.

5 stars, A+, thumbs up... all that shit. read this book.
...less

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Jeffrey rated it:

(review of isbn 0679732241)

03/31/07

bookshelves: favorites

Read in December, 2005

recommends it for: Those Interested in the American Experience

While everyone salivates (rightfully so) over 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 representation of the American South, is a stew of styles and tones that change as rapidly at the South. The story, told from four distinct points of view, remains not only the most deftly wri...more

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Judy rated it:

(review of isbn 0679732241)

07/05/08

Read in July, 2008

"A house divided...."
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 happened to wealthy, notable southern families following the Civil War. there is lengthy discourse and focus on racism. Also, misogyny.

I purchased this book used from Housing Works book store in NYC which be...more "A house divided...."
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 happened to wealthy, notable southern families following the Civil War. there is lengthy discourse and focus on racism. Also, misogyny.

I purchased this book used from Housing Works book store in NYC which benefits homeless men with Aides. I'm glad I got it used because whoever owned it previously wrote very helpful notes in the margins.

Some sections are extremely opaque. With some research and patience I realized what was going on, it is something of a puzzle to interpret. This novel was radical when it came out, with its switching narrations and time changes. It allows the reader to look at a situation from different perspectives, so there are different versions of reality.

This book opens with a confusing narration coming from the mind of the autistic/mentally handicapped manchild Maury/Benjamin. He jumps back and forth through three different time periods. Benjy's moaning, weeping, bellowing comes from a place of instinctual awareness of the cruelties and sadness going on around him. It is his only means of expression and it is deeply existential. He is aware of sensations but not a slave to time. He "smells" death in the house and recognizes sickness ( smell of camphor ) on the wet towel laid on his mother's forehead. He thinks "Caddy smells like trees"

"blue gums": Someone with bluish gums whose bite is supposed to be poisonous, also, African people with very dark skin supposedly have bluish black gums.

The following chapters are written from the perspective of the two other brothers of the southern family which over the years falls into ruin and misfortune, loosing their land to a golf course among other worse tragedies.

there's some comic narration when Jason Jr.'s sarcasm and fatalism get extreme: he gets a pounding headache caused by smelling gasoline, has a flat tire, gets torn by thorns, has the sun shining straight into his eyes and puts his hand on some poison oak.

There is hope in the family caretaker Dilsey who nursed all the children, cooked all the meals, etc and is the only one, along with Benjy, to escape the trap of time with her Christianity, belief in the eternal, and ability to love. Benjy finds peace only during the church service on Easter Sunday, the day following his 33 birthday—which lead some to call him a Christ-figure in the novel. ...less

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Ginnie rated it:

(review of isbn 0393964817)

08/07/08

bookshelves: literature

The Sound and the Fury is made up of undifferentiated streams of consciousness that ultimately turn out to be the inner voices of a family's siblings. Its construction is so masterful that the last sentence refers the reader back to the first one, as any perfect work of art might do. Although it has the earmarks of a modern psychological study, the book was published in 1929. It is a dramatic and harrowing tale of the Compson family's pathology—primarily in the form of incest and inces...more

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Ben rated it:

(review of isbn 0679732241)

03/16/07

Read in October, 1998

The breaking of many conventions of writing can quickly become passé and merely distracting. Others cause the uninitiated reader a healthy dose of frustration. When you have to read a work like The Sound & the Fury for a class, the frustration may not easily be overcome: Faulkner narrates the story of a family in turn-of-the-century northern Mississippi (or "Missippi," as many, including the state's current governor, call it) through the eyes of its sons and its female house se...more The breaking of many conventions of writing can quickly become passé and merely distracting. Others cause the uninitiated reader a healthy dose of frustration. When you have to read a work like The Sound & the Fury for a class, the frustration may not easily be overcome: Faulkner narrates the story of a family in turn-of-the-century northern Mississippi (or "Missippi," as many, including the state's current governor, call it) through the eyes of its sons and its female house servant. Said difficulties surface on the first page, since Faulkner tells the first section of the story with the thoughts (thankfully not the thoughts others hear) of the grown, but mentally retarded Benjy. The first line, "through the curled flower spaces I could see them hitting," provides a foil to American Literature's more famous first line, "call me Ishmael." [Book: Moby Dick]'s first line, if you stop there for a moment, conjures up a lot of description without saying it, in simple language. The childlike Benjy, paradoxically, provides very little in very difficult language.

But it's all for a reason. The more the reader works at slogging through the language until she can "get it," the more rewarding this, as with most of Faulkner's work, becomes. The second section provides a change, though no relief, in language, tone, and themes. While Benjy's section displays displaced innocence, Quentin's displays the innocence of his life that he rejects for the more mature brokenness that comes with experience in knowledge. In either case, both characters prove unable to cope.

Oh, yeah, and the narrative is not temporally linear either.

So why in the world would I love this book like I do? Well, I was born in Missippi and my family hails from there, so Faulkner's imagery of the natural really sticks with me. As stated before, the confusing language actually results in increased clarity as to what's happening the characters' minds. As the text reveals, surprisingly little actually occurs in the book that would sustain most readers' attention. But several events are referenced many times and color the characters'/narrators' view of the world they live in, in a way that lends this events otherwise rendered prosaic in a traditional narrative ("his sister Candace slept with the big university boy she had met. Quentin was so mad" - doesn't quite have the same effect....).

We all blow things out of proportion and perceive events and people as occurring or living in a world that doesn't exist. Here's what you get when an author puts that phenomenon into print....less

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Jason rated it:

(review of isbn 0679732241)

08/22/08

Read in August, 2008

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally. Sorry -- because of Goodreads' word-count limitations, the last paragraph today got cut off!)

The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label

Book #22: The Sound and the Fury, b...more

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Kris rated it:

(review of isbn 0679732241)

06/18/08

Read in June, 2008

by William Faulkner

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, and so I'm hoping that in the next few days I can make up for the brief lull in posts on this site over the past month.

So let's begin with the book I read on the flight down - a little light airplane readi...more by William Faulkner

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, and so I'm hoping that in the next few days I can make up for the brief lull in posts on this site over the past month.

So let's begin with the book I read on the flight down - a little light airplane reading, probably one of the top three most confusing books I've ever read.

My inclination to try to re-read The Sound and The Fury came while finishing Cloud Atlas. During the "Sloosha's Crossing" episode, I was amazed at how smoothly I was able to read the choppy English of the narrator and it reminded me of Faulkner somehow. I tried to read Sound for the first time in college, during a graduate class with John Irwin (who has an essay in the back of the Norton edition, how cool is that?) and all I remember was showing up on the first day and realizing that we'd been expected to read prior to the class beginning, so I was already behind. Irwin's lecture was mind-bogglingly amazing, as all his lectures for that class were (Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Hemingway) and so when I got home I cracked open the book and immediately began to read. Unfortunately I couldn't understand a word of it, even after he'd thoroughly explained the story and the chronology and the characters in class. Soon I gave up and started reading A Light in August which was due for the following week.

So, The Sound and the Fury round two. After 5 years and another degree, does it make any more sense?

Yes, yes it does! I still had to look in the back at the chronology, and I still had to puzzle through, but I made it through the first two sections in a few hours while waiting for my flight to arrive. Unfortunately I got stalled again after boarding the flight, which will forever after be known as The Flight of Obnoxious Kids and Screaming Babies. I gave up during the third section and flipped ahead to the essays in the back, which were a little easier to digest while distracted.

The Irwin essay was just as good as I remembered, and brought back a lot of things from his lectures that I'd thought I'd forgotten (somewhere I still have my notebook from that class...) But the essay that really caught me this time was by Sartre. As you may remember from earlier posts, I'm not all that impressed by JP's attempts at fiction, but if it's bleak philosophy you want, he's a good man to try. Sartre examines the messy chronology of The Sound and the Fury. He argues that the way to read it is not to try and separate the confusing muddle of perspectives or reorder the jumble of time, but to embrace the disorganized flow and see that Faulkner is trying to show us that reality is not about what's happened in the past but an ever-unfolding series of presents. What happened in the past is relevant as it shapes our every present moment, but no more real in and of itself than the future that hasn't happened yet. Sartre goes on about this at great length, explaining much better than I can here, but concludes by saying that while he admires Faulkner's attempts, he does not agree that all of this temporal shuffling exposes the essential absurdity of human life. Sartre still seems to think life is absurd, just not because of this. Anyway.

The last little tidbit that I got out of the back was something that came up in several of Faulkner's letters and interviews. Apparently he wrote the various sections thinking he could tell this as a short story. First he tried Benjy's point of view, but it didn't get the whole thing somehow. So he tried again from Quentin's and still felt like it was missing. So he tried writing it from his own voice and still felt like it wasn't quite there. In the end it was only the sum-total of all these short stories that finally got around the heart of the matter. I don't know if it quite justifies the difficulty, but it certainly does help me understand why he'd try and write something like this.

Anyway, maybe in five years I'll try a third time, when I'm not on a plane, and manage to get all the way through it....less

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Chad rated it:

(review of isbn 0679732241)

05/30/08

Read in April, 2008

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

When I began reading The Sound and the Fury I feared that I would hate the entire experience, because the text was written much like the Joyce novel I had eventually given up on a year ago. Indeed, I found the first section of the book to be nearly illegible and thus both tedious and frustrating. There are several reasons for this difficulty.

First, much of the book is written as a stream of consciousness without regard to conventions of grammar or rational thought. Second, there are signific...more When I began reading The Sound and the Fury I feared that I would hate the entire experience, because the text was written much like the Joyce novel I had eventually given up on a year ago. Indeed, I found the first section of the book to be nearly illegible and thus both tedious and frustrating. There are several reasons for this difficulty.

First, much of the book is written as a stream of consciousness without regard to conventions of grammar or rational thought. Second, there are significant differences between English as spoken in suburban Pennsylvania circa 2008 and English as spoken in the rural South circa 1928. Third, the text shifts wildly through time and place, often within the same paragraph, as the characters’ memories merge with present experiences. At times these shifts are accompanied by italics, but in most cases they are not. Fourth, there are a multiplicity of characters, none of which are introduced or described, but who simply appear. Within the first few pages the reader has met nearly all of the members of the Compson family (Damuddy, Uncle Maury, (Father) Jason, (Mother) Caroline, Benjamin (also known as Maury), Quentin, Jason, Candace, and Quentin the younger) and their various servants (Dilsey, T.P., Versh, and Luster). Fifth, the careful reader will have noted two Jasons, two Maurys, and two Quentins in the above list. In the case of the Jasons and Maurys this is not a significant problem because the elder Jason is usually called Father and the younger Maury is usually referred to by his new name Benjamin. The Quentins, however, are exceptionally confusing. From the beginning the reader will notice that Quentin is sometimes referred to using a masculine pronoun and other times a feminine one, but the narrative is so fractured that he is likely to explain this as either a typographical error or his own failure to parse the text. It does not become clear until the third section of the book, and is never explicitly stated, that there are two persons named Quentin. This source of misunderstanding is so extreme, and could be rectified so easily, that I must assume it is a deliberate attempt by the author to confuse the reader, presumably to highlight the turmoil in Benjamin’s mind.

Thankfully, the second section is much clearer than the first, and the last two are quite lucid in comparison to either of their predecessors. Based on these sections, I found the novel quite enjoyable. It lacks an over-arching plot, but describes the slow downfall of a once-proud family in a compelling way.

The entirety of the portions of the text that I understood points to a theme of futility – most obviously in Benjamin’s severe mental retardation, but also in the meaningless trysts of Candace and the younger Quentin, the pride and avarice of the younger Jason, the elder Quentin’s struggle to find meaning in his Harvard education, Caroline’s resignation to remain in bed until her ever-expected near death, Dilsey’s devotion to her never-ending tasks, and even Luster’s malice toward Benjamin. I did not recall the title’s prior use in Macbeth until searching for it now, but it seemed to me an echo of Ecclesiastes.

I would like to read the book again with the knowledge I now have, because while I slogged through the most difficult parts, I really understood very little of the first quarter. Perhaps I will do so someday, but for now the task seems too great....less

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Paula rated it:

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08/21/07

bookshelves: fantasticallywierd

Read in April, 1992

Sensory overload...ah, what I remember: living on Esplanade in New Orleans with a flea-bitten dog and piles of salty crawdad refuse which smelled of muddy embankments and salty brew. I was feeling somewhat queasy when I lay down to begin this book-- like Faulkner's greatest works, its not so much like reading as story as it is like entering a dream. It blasted open new windows of extra-sensory perception-- I could hear the ghosts upstairs, I could distinguish about 26 different smells in the ...more

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Samantha rated it:

(review of isbn 0393964817)

04/13/08

Read in August, 2006

faulkner had me as a seventeen year old in junior english when we read intruder in the dust. i love this man for two very important reasons: 1) he is from the south, writes about the south, loves the south, yet is the sharpest critic of its most obvious downfalls and 2) whenever i read this guy, i can't stop writing myself. his stream of consciousness tales get in my head, and i can do nothing but dribble out my thoughts in much the same fashion he does. i fell in love with his style with intrud...more

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Jack rated it:

(review of isbn 0679732241)

06/01/07

bookshelves: jackrecommends, reallygoodstuff

Read in October, 2006

recommends it for: masochistic literary nuts, and those who ascribe to become one

Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” infuriated me. In my youth, I tried his “Light in August” and gave up after about fifty pages – just too difficult. “The Sound” makes “Light” seem like a first grade reader. Some maturity in hand, I took the Faulkner challenge once more.

In what many consider a classic and a masterpiece, Faulkner blazes away with, not just stream of consciousness, but with multiple first-person narrations by multiple characters, all with som...more

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Yulia added it

06/14/08

bookshelves: repelled-by

Read in January, 2008

I've read so many times how brilliant this is, and it very well may be, but each time I try to read it and really hope I can, I 'm never able to get past the first page. Perhaps my subconscious knows I'd be irreparably traumatized by something on the second page (or have I already been traumatized by the first?), I'm not sure. But this is certainly one of those books I'll try again and again till I either make more progress, can be more articulate about why I refuse to finish it, or have the c...more

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Charity rated it:

(review of isbn 0679732241)

05/23/08

bookshelves: awesomest-books-ever

this is my favorite book. i've read it at different points in my life and it amazes me that i notice something different each time i read it. it contains the best description of passionate love that i've ever read - (put your hand on my heart - say his name) - ah so wonderful. i also so love the images and smells (the ever present honeysuckle). it is so intensely evocative. sadly, i think in real life i have only met around 5 people who've read this book! it just doesn't seem to make most peopl...more

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Clif rated it:

(review of isbn 0739325353)

09/25/08

Read in September, 2008

My first impression of the book's narrative can be summarized as; (1) Everything has a smell for Benji, (2) Quienten notices his shadow, (3) Jason is angry, and (4) Dilsey sees the light. If this summary doesn't clearly communicate a story to you, welcome to The Sound And The Fury! The book doesn't tell a story. Rather it is a description of a condition from four different points of view. The condition being described is that of the corruption of Southern aristocratic values. The fir...more My first impression of the book's narrative can be summarized as; (1) Everything has a smell for Benji, (2) Quienten notices his shadow, (3) Jason is angry, and (4) Dilsey sees the light. If this summary doesn't clearly communicate a story to you, welcome to The Sound And The Fury! The book doesn't tell a story. Rather it is a description of a condition from four different points of view. The condition being described is that of the corruption of Southern aristocratic values. The first three views of the four being expressed are from the perspective of the three brothers in the family. Their views are that of a southern family aware of their aristocratic past but with a present psychological condition of utter demise. The fourth view is described from the view point of an omniscient narrator describing the life of the African-American house servant and her family. This last view together with the Easter timing gives a theme of possible resurrection and renewal for the future. It's interesting to note that the family in degenerate condition is made up of descendants of the slave owning class, and the productive workers who are the hope for the future are descendants of slaves.

The very end of the book contains a clash that is symbolic of the future conflict to come as the Old South changes into the New South. Luster, the black grandson of Dilsey, is driving a horse and wagon into the town square where a marble statue of a Confederate soldier stands. Luster decides to turn toward the left. Suddenly, the youngest son, Jason, jumps up into the wagon and forces the horse to turn right instead. This disagreement between whether to turn left or right appears symbolic of disagreements over directions for the future.

Readers are likely to feel a bit lost while navigating through the interior monologs, tricks with time, jumbled narrative, play of memory, and also saga of decay and decline of a southern family. Appreciation of the book begins after the reader has finished reading the book. The fun comes from trying to put the pieces together and to begin marveling at the abundance of meanings that can be gleaned from the book. Perhaps it is a 20th Century version of Shakespeare's Macbeth. Is Benjy a Christ figure? Is there a message of resurrection and renewal? Is it only about corruption of Southern aristocratic values? Is it about false and true visions? Why does the time motif keep showing up? Is it a contrast of order and chaos? What is the meaning of the frequent references to shadows. What is the symbolic meaning of Quentin's watch? How about the role of water in the story? Or is the book a prime example of the failure of language and narrative by being itself a failure to communicate?

How do you rate the number of stars for a book that is torture to read, but a pleasure to interpret? Well, for me it's three stars....less

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Nate rated it:

(review of isbn 0679732241)

08/19/08

bookshelves: classics, own

Read in August, 2008

I was a bit intimidated when I started this novel, but it really does become more accessible as it progresses and is absolutely worth the effort required. The characters, at times extremely frustrating, are wrought with depth and tragic humanity like no other novel's. Faulkner's combined use of stream of consciousness and frequent perspective shifts allows the reader to form a unique, intense relationship with most of the main characters in a way not possible through typical first person or th...more I was a bit intimidated when I started this novel, but it really does become more accessible as it progresses and is absolutely worth the effort required. The characters, at times extremely frustrating, are wrought with depth and tragic humanity like no other novel's. Faulkner's combined use of stream of consciousness and frequent perspective shifts allows the reader to form a unique, intense relationship with most of the main characters in a way not possible through typical first person or third person omniscient narratives. Even if we can't relate to their particular situations, we can identify with their feelings of frustration, loss, regret, embarrassment, pride, and shame, because Faulkner has given us such nuanced insight into their subconscious and conscious worlds.

The first section, narrated by Benjy is the most difficult to comprehend for several reasons. We're not yet familiar with any of the characters, the temporal changes are abrupt, perspective shifts without warning, and our primary narrator is mentally deficient. However, I think the main difficulty in coherency is due to our unfamiliarity with the characters and events being described, not solely due to the narrative style. I highly recommend rereading this section after finishing the novel, as it will then be much clearer.

Quentin's narrative section is just as challenging stylistically as Benjy's, if not more anxiety producing due to the obsessiveness and depression conveyed in his stream of consciousness bursts, but narratively the puzzle pieces begin to fall into place with a bit more clarity.

Things get much more lucid once we get to Jason's narrative, but the trade off is dealing with his brutal cynicism without throwing the book across the room. The only way to comprehend his inhumanity is to remind oneself of the cruel, unstable environment in which he was raised.

Finally, the last section of the book abandons first person narrative voice and stream of consciousness for a third person omniscient view mostly centered around Dilsey, who has endured more hardships than any of the Compsons. It is in this section that we see the true strength of her mental and spiritual fortitude, especially awe inspiring when contrasted with the weakness and selfishness of the Compson family.

Through the tragedy of the Compsons, Faulkner illustrates the tragedy of the post Civil War South. Their self-pity, bitter resentment of unavoidable circumstances, abnegation of responsibility and failed self-righteousness creates and fuels their own descent into shame, financial ruin, and death. Ironically, it is the servants, treated like animals by the Compsons, who weather unimaginable ha