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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN: 9780679732242
ISBN: 0679732241
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 336
Publication Date: 1991-01-30
Publisher: Vintage
Product Release Date: 1991-01-30
Studio: Vintage

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:

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.

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

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Astonishing
Review: It's difficult to point to a more complex and tragically beautiful American novel than Faulkner's 'The Sound and the Fury.' Composed with a kind of crazed inspiration, Faulkner traces the decline and ruin of the Compson family from the point of view of four of its members, the severely disabled Benjy, the self-destructive Quentin, and the resigned Jason. Dilsey, the African-American servant to the Compsons, remains one of the richest and most truly felt of all literary characters. This novel is extremely difficult in form; Faulkner's subtle use of first-person stream of consciousness narration and nonlinear chronology is both baffling and fascinating. Additionally, his removed 'appendix' after the completion of the narrative is as modern as anything that has been printed in the last thirty years. Presented as a tragic vision through a blurry bottle, 'The Sound and the Fury' will continue to haunt and perplex for as long as it is read and studied. A true masterpiece.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: The fury I get, the sound is muted, signifying nothing
Review: Disturbing images and strong characters are reduced to baffling shadows by Faulkner's extreme stream of consciousness writing style. There is no discernible plot here, although one can sense a general downward trend in family fortunes, in every way: materially, spiritually, genetically, historically, and cooperatively.

And plenty of anger, which seems to infuse every character's interaction with the extended family and the surrounding community. This fury produces plenty of sound, in a sort of "day in the life" view of four different days from four different characters over a span of nearly 20 years, but the net result signifies nothing except a troubling sense of disquiet and collapse.

This is not an easy book to like.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: a study of the poor south
Review: First off yes Fulkner is hard to read sometimes, but he got the poor south dialect down pat. As to his charecters, yes some are uneducated, rascist. These are what people are no matter where one lives. He wrote about a time period and the people who he obsewrved were what they were. Not the southern aristocracy, but the common, uneducated, farmers. Mark Twain wrote about the same things Faulkner did, they are in the same category of writers. Get over it and enjoy the books for what they are good literature.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Unbelievable
Review: This is the greatest novel I've ever read. When I read Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying", I was only moderately interested and figured I'd never revisit the man again. Thank god I decided to pick this one up, and just barely at that.
The first portion of the book, concerning Benjy, is a gentle step into the water, and if you can't process this part, forget about understanding Quentin's segment. Quentin's portion of the novel is phenomenal, it simply is unparalleled in comparison to anything else I've ever read, period. There comes a part at the end of this segment where Faulkner even diminishes grammar until he's literally using none at all, and its been said that this is one of the more difficult parts of the work. I should say that I found it the least challenging because it flowed intuitively- it was although I 'felt' it instead of 'read' it because my imagination was already working over time and Faulkner was just orchestrating it at that point. Jason's portion and the character-relative third person portion are easier and much more reminiscent of Faulkner's other work, but the substance of this works exists within Benjy's and Quentin's segment.
All this in mind, I would say if you think you have the ability, try to read this. Probably a good stepping stone into "In Search of Lost Time", "Ulysses" or "Gravity's Rainbow".

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Made me want to be a writer...
Review: This was my first "favorite" novel. I read it as an adolescent and (perhaps because I was young and non-judgmental?) found it quite an easy read. I hadn't yet read the other great modern writers - Woolfe, Joyce. Later, I would place them among my favorites as well, but "Fury" was my original taste of "stream of consciousness" and I ate it up. I remember being blown away by the first chapter; the thunder-clap of recognition as I realized that it was "a tale told by an idiot;" that was the best of it for me, though I raced through the rest of the novel greedily, and re-read it for things I had missed (as one reviewer has said here, you could read it again and again for this reason). In any case, when I was finished, I knew I would be a writer. For many years I wrote in a Faulkner-ish style. I suppose many of us did. However, I have just picked it up again, as a mature reader and find that it is just as magnificent as my first "taste." However - I have been enjoying other parts of the novel as much, if not more, than that first, enigmatic, mind-blowing chapter. Here's to you, WF, wherever you are, for starting me on a great journey!

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