The Sound and the Fury

by William Faulkner

I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.

Have there been very many Caddy I dont know too many will you look after Benjy and Father You dont know whose it is then does he know

After all, like I say money has no value; it’s just the way you spend it. It dont belong to anybody, so why try to hoard it. It just belongs to the man that can get it and keep it.

“It’s your money,” I says. “If you want to throw it to the birds even, it’s your business.”

“He’s my own brother,” Mother says. “He’s the last Bascomb. When we are gone there wont be any more of them.” “That’ll be hard on somebody, I guess,” I says.

Like a man would naturally think, one of them is crazy and another one drowned himself and the other one was turned out into the street by her husband, what’s the reason the rest of them are not crazy too.

Faulkner wanted the Appendix to be the first section of the book, which is how it appeared in early editions, but later it was put at the end. Scholars and critics have frequently treated it as an equal part of the novel, although many consider it to be as separate and distinct from The Sound and the Fury as “That Evening Sun” and other stories involving the Compson family are separate and distinct fictional entities. The text published here is newly edited by Noel Polk from Faulkner’s carbon typescript.

just in time to bury the father and enter upon a long period of being a split personality while still trying to be the schoolteacher which he believed he wanted to be, until he gave up at last and became the gambler he actually was and which no Compson seemed to realize they all were provided the gambit was desperate and the odds long enough.

his expulsion due not to the treason but to his having been so vocal and vociferant in the conduct of it, burning each bridge vocally behind him before he had even reached the place to build the next one:

Committed suicide in Cambridge Massachusetts, June 1910, two months after his sister’s wedding, waiting first to complete the current academic year and so get the full value of his paid-in-advance tuition, not because he had his old Culloden and Carolina and Kentucky grandfathers in him but because the remaining piece of the old Compson mile which had been sold to pay for his sister’s wedding and his year at Harvard had been the one thing, excepting that same sister and the sight of an open fire, which his youngest brother, born an idiot, had loved.

loved three things: the pasture which was sold to pay for Candace’s wedding and to send Quentin to Harvard, his sister Candace, firelight. Who lost none of them because he could not remember his sister but only the loss of her, and firelight was the same bright shape as going to sleep, and the pasture was even better sold than before because now he and TP could not only follow timeless along the fence the motions which it did not even matter to him were humanbeings swinging golfsticks, TP could lead them to the clumps of grass or weeds where there would appear suddenly in TP’s hand small white spherules which competed with and even conquered what he did not even know was gravity and all the immutable laws when released from the hand toward plank floor or smokehouse wall or concrete sidewalk. Gelded 1913. Committed to the State Asylum, Jackson 1933. Lost nothing then either because, as with his sister, he remembered not the pasture but only its loss, and firelight was still the same bright shape of sleep.

paid the taxes for years which supported them in parasitic and sadistic idleness; not only that, he didn’t dare pursue the girl himself because he might catch her and she would talk, so that his only recourse was a vain dream which kept him tossing and sweating on nights two and three and even four years after the event, when he should have forgotten about it: of catching her without warning, springing on her out of the dark, before she had had time to spend all the money, and murder her before she had time to open her mouth) and climbed down the same rainpipe in the dusk and ran away with the pitchman who was already under sentence for bigamy.

The novel’s title is taken from a monologue spoken by Shakespeare’s Macbeth, who has attained the throne of Scotland through murder and has held it through the most brutal violence and tyranny; at this point in the play he has just heard that his wife has killed herself. Sated with his own corruption and looking forward to his imminent defeat and death, he says: “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow/ Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,/ To the last syllable of recorded time/ And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/ The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!/ Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/ And then is heard no more. It is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing.”