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The Sound and the Fury

William Faulkner

Start date: November 1, 2019

Finish date: November 30, 2019

Discussion: New School Classics- 1915-2005

Why we're reading this: Revisit the Shelf reread, November 2019
Contemporary Classic Group Read, December 2011
[close] Revisit the Shelf reread, November 2019
Contemporary Classic Group Read, December 2011

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What Members Thought

Dec 13, 2017 Kelly_Hunsaker_reads ... rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 1001-books, american-lit, oprah-bookclub

William Faulkner makes my brain hurt... but it is worth it. This book is profound. Tragic. Brutal. Complex. Beautiful!

Faulkner tells this story in four chapters, each narrated by a different person and occurring on a different day. The story is not told chronologically and based on the advice of another Goodreads member I returned to the first chapter upon completion of the book. It helped me understand the story more fully. The writing style reflects the character perfectly. Two chapters are st ...more

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Jul 08, 2012 Laura marked it as to-read

Shelves: fiction-20th-century, southern-gothic, american-fiction, e-books, 1001-books-you-must-read-before-you, gutenberg

Free download available at Faded Page. ...more

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Nov 27, 2019 Maggie rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: family-drama, unreliable-narrator, usa, guardian-1000, experimental, boxall-1001, fiction, classics

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. “Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.”

This is a cataclysmic book. It doesn't appear that way in premise – it is about a single family, in Jefferson, a single, remote county in Mississippi, about four siblings who make no impact on the world or their country and little impact even on their own society. Yet in the siblings' individual downfalls and in “Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets.”

This is a cataclysmic book. It doesn't appear that way in premise – it is about a single family, in Jefferson, a single, remote county in Mississippi, about four siblings who make no impact on the world or their country and little impact even on their own society. Yet in the siblings' individual downfalls and in the tragic, self-annihilating end of the once-powerful Compson family line, you get the feeling of horror of watching a train barreling down a track towards a cliff, and the feeling of complacency as a bystander who is unable to do anything to help and knows it.

The book is divided into four sections, the first narrated by Benjy, the intellectually impaired youngest brother who loves his sister Caddy, the second by Quentin, the brother who loves his family's honour and commits suicide over Caddy's illegitimate pregnancy and marriage to a cheat, and the third by Jason as an adult, bitter and resentful over the circumstances that have led to him being the last remaining sane Compson carrying the burdens of his family's failures. The fourth section is the only one narrated in third-person, and takes a big picture view of the collapse of the Compsons, and the endurance of their Negro servants, who despite being downtrodden, survive, in a classic tortoise versus hare way.

Benjy's section is the most difficult to read. Faulkner dives into his mind without introduction, and his mind is a confusing place, complex in its overwhelming simplicity. Benjy does not understand time. The section is titled April 7 1928 and supposedly takes place on a single day, his 33rd birthday. But as different parts of the day trigger memories of his past, scenes from the past and present intermingle, switching from one to another between paragraphs, between sentences, sometimes even within the same sentence, with only inconsistent italicisations informing the reader that the scene has changed, and no explanation of which point in time Benjy is referencing. Benjy does not understand causation. He sees a fire and he is happy, he sees a wire and the fire goes out and he cries, but he does not realise that the wire has extinguished the fire. He does not fully understand even objects, recognising them by the impressions they make, such that he loves fire only because the bright shapes calm him down. Yet he has a remarkably perceptive sense of smell. He loves Caddy, the only person who is kind to him, and "Caddy smells like trees". When she kisses a man or applies perfume, Benjy knows because she no longer smells like trees, and he cries. When Caddy washes the smell off, he calms down. But when she loses her virginity, she can no longer wash the smell of impurity off, and Benjy is inconsolable. Reading Benjy's section is detective work. I had to flip back and forth as later pages explained previous sections, and even when later sections in the book explained Benjy's. I know the difficulty of reading this chapter turns some readers off, but persevere with it and the challenge is strangely satisfying, and deeply rewarding.

Quentin's section is difficult to read in a different way. Stream of consciousness in Quentin's mind is not a mambo-jumbo of thoughts, but the thoughts flow into one another continuously, such that whole pages have no punctuation marks. At times his sentences don't even make sense, but the content of the sentences do not matter as much as the emotions and images that underlie the sentences. Quentin's life is ordered and disciplined, as the motif of clocks in his section reveals, but we are given a glimpse into perhaps one of the rare moments of disorder in his life as he heads for suicide. The contrasts are stark – his sense of honour and his family's dishonour, his sexual innocence and the incestual sexual tension between him and Caddy, his intelligence and the meaninglessness of his world. It is a story of tragedy and misguidance.

"Once a bitch, always a bitch, I say." With that, Jason begins his section. He is perhaps the most dislikable character. In his mind, Caddy's marriage and subsequent divorce cost him a job, for her husband had promised him a job. Thus he blames Caddy, and her illegitimate daughter Miss Quentin, for his misfortunes. He is unreasonably bitter, resentful and vindictive, and he bullies everyone around him, including his mother, who loves him (or so she claims), Benjy, whom he commits to an asylum after his mother dies, and Miss Quentin, who, under his semblance of parenthood, grows up rebellious. Caddy still gives Miss Quentin $500 every month, and secretly begs Jason to show Caddy kindness, but Jason steals the money. Thus when Caddy breaks into his room, steals the money back, and runs off, Jason finds nobody who can sympathise, and no justice he can turn to to save him from injustice. Yet despite his unpleasantness, I found Jason to be a character I could sympathise with. His parents, one an alcoholic and the other a hypochondriac, were never able to raise him well. While his siblings are nicer people, their behaviours and actions bring the family to its downfall, and Jason, as the only sane Compson left, is left to handle the burden of the consequences. He may be cruel and self-piteous, but he is still a victim of his circumstances, and his cruelty and self-piteousness grew out of his circumstances.

Then we have Dilsey. Dilsey, the only person who recognises that she has seen the rise and fall of the Compsons, and accepts it. Dilsey, the one person who treats Benjy like a human after Caddy leaves. Dilsey, the servant to the whites, but the only person able to control, even if only to a small extent, Mrs Compson, Jason, and Miss Quentin, all while raising her own children and her grandson Luster. Dilsey and her family are not perfect. They have their sins. But in contrast to the majestic rise and fall of the Compsons, Dilsey's family survives in a silent, humble, enduring state.

The epilogue was added in 1946, 17 years after the original book was published. In encyclopaedic style, yet un-encyclopaedic in content, it details the stories of each of the Compsons, from the first ancestor to the last descendant. We learn the ends of each of the characters. In particular, we learn that Caddy had at least two husbands, was wealthy, and was last seen prior to WWII as presumably the spouse of a German soldier. Despite being an outcast from the Compson family, she is the only sibling who "made it" financially. But was she ever happy? Or was the last photo of her with the German soldier a symbol of her tragic ending? Jason, after losing all his money, finally dispossessed himself of the burden of his family and its property, which was always too much for him to handle. He seems to finally have learnt to work hard, and the relationship he has with his mistress indicates that he may have even managed to settle down into a semi-domestic life.

Don't read this if you want a pleasant story. Read it if you want something tragically, devastatingly majestic. ...more

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