Reading Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury

The 2025 commemorative printing of the original 1929 cover and page type.  It is a nice addition to my library.

Somehow through all these years of interest in the works of William Faulkner, particularly in the 1990's, I never got around to reading what many consider to be his best novel. It's summertime in Georgia and a fine time to read Faulkner so I decided to finally read The Sound and the Fury. While I can appreciate why it gets the praise it does (and the confusion is causes), I wouldn't put it among the truly great novels. It is bold, clever, and sometimes even poetic. But in the end, it struck me as more of a formal performance than a work that genuinely absorbed me the way Light in August and As I Lay Dying do. I has all the Faulkner brilliance about it but that doesn't always equal greatness in my mind.

It is a book told in four chapters. Three of these chapters take place over Easter weekend in 1928. The fourth takes place years earlier and features a character whose suicide still overshadows events of this weekend. That chapter is told from the perspective of Quentin, the most educated and intelligent of the narrators. Chapter three is from Jason's perspective. The final chapter features the family's primary black servant, Dilsey, and is told in third-person. But Faulkner chose to open the tale with a stream of consciousness narration by a person who has no sense of time at all.

The Benjy section that opens the novel is ballsy. I admire the choice to throw the reader into a chaotic, sensorial world with no clear narrative guideposts. It forces you to experience a character's consciousness in a way that's rarely attempted in literature. More disorienting than William Gibson's Neuromancer or Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. I had no idea what was happening, with only flickers of comprehension cutting through the confusion. I read it twice before moving on to Chapter 2, and even then I still had no clue what was happening for the most part.

But I admire Faulkner for having the balls to write it that way. Opening a novel with Benjy's consciousness, with no preparation or explanation, was an extremely bold decision in 1929. Faulkner could have eased readers in with a more conventional approach, but instead he chose to throw us directly into the most challenging consciousness he'd created. Joyce's Ulysses was only seven years old and still scandalous. Faulkner was essentially betting that readers would stick with something that actively resisted comprehension for almost 60 pages.

Benjy's intellectual disability means his narrative has no linear time sense. He cannot speak or communicate in any way other than to cry or make various grunt noises. His mind (and thus the story) jumps between past and present based on sensory triggers like the smell of trees or the sound of his name, but there are no clear transitions or explanations. Faulkner eases the shock a bit by making alternating timelines alternate between italics and regular font, but, frustratingly, this is not always the case. For Benjy, who exists in an eternal present, his sister Caddy, who he adores more than anyone, leaving yesterday and Caddy as a child thirty years ago occupy the same emotional space. He is a broken clock.

I had to go back and reread the Benjy section a third time after finishing the novel, and even then, I didn't catch all the time shifts. That didn't bother me. What mattered more was the atmosphere of disorientation, the emotional weight of Caddy's absence, and the sense that Benjy is trapped in an eternal, fragmented now.

Quentin's chapter is the strongest in the book for me. Moving to his tortured but more familiar consciousness felt like relief after Benjy's fragmented world. His inner monologue is rich, painful, confused, philosophical, and weirdly beautiful. Where Benjy lives in the eternal present, Quentin is haunted by time. He smashes his watch but can't escape the clock's ticking in his mind. He visits a clock shop but doesn't get his time "fixed." He spirals, drowning in thoughts about honor, purity, Caddy, death, and the South.

Reading The Sound and the Fury after having read Absalom, Absalom! a couple of times many years ago added a layer of heartbreak I didn't expect. I had met Quentin before as a thoughtful, haunted young man trying to make sense of Southern myth and family trauma. He fascinated me in Absalom. So when I realized that he commits suicide in The Sound and the Fury, it shocked me. Had I read the novels in order of publication, that impact wouldn't have landed. But reading them out of order gave me the fuller tragedy. I watched a character I had admired fall apart. His death in Sound retroactively darkens Absalom (which is pretty dark already). He wasn't just parsing history, he was losing his soul to it.

Quentin's section is where Faulkner's prose hits a fever pitch. It's ornate, poetic, suffocating. That haunting phrase from his father keeps poisoning his mind: the "reductio ad absurdum of all human experience." His father's nihilistic philosophy systematically undermines every value and ideal Quentin desperately wants to believe in. "Father was teaching us that all men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away the sawdust flowing from what wound in what side that not for me died not." Quentin feels excluded even from the possibility of Christian redemption. He is broken, but still trying to think his way through that brokenness. He fails. But we feel the effort.

Jason's chapter returns to more traditional storytelling, and it's ugly and fast. He's the kind of detestable character who always feels like he's trying to outrun something: grievance, insignificance, his own smallness. His relationship to time is all present-tense, all hustle. Time is money, and control, and threat. No one likes Jason, and I'm in their league, but I found his sarcasm to be quite humorous at times. He's a bitter man caught in a loop of resentment, endlessly repeating the same complaints. His caustic wit can be genuinely funny, even when you're horrified by what he's doing. Compared to Benjy's unconscious anguish and Quentin's philosophical despair, Jason just feels shallow, mean, and doomed to be petty.

A perfect note of humor comes from Benji's primary caregiver, Luster, who a couple of times proclaims that some behavior on his part was the case and adds something to the effect of "if you don't believe me just ask Benjy." The kid knows perfectly well that Benjy can't contradict him or provide any coherent testimony, so he's created the perfect alibi. It's exactly the kind of moment that can catch you off guard, making you laugh out loud in the middle of all this family tragedy. Yeah, just ask this drooling idiot, he'll tell you.

And then there's Dilsey. She doesn't get a chapter of her own, and that's no accident. Faulkner knew better than to try to speak in her voice. She is black, she doesn't get a voice in 1920's Mississippi. Instead, we see her from the outside, and what we see is endurance. Dignity. Quiet strength. She's the only one whose relationship with time seems sane. She knows the clock in the Compson house is three hours off (for some unexplained reason), but she lives in real time. Not myth, not obsession, not fantasy. She bears witness to the Compson family's decline and keeps going.

Dilsey emerges as the moral and emotional anchor of the book, even if she doesn't get to speak directly. Her silence is a statement about racism, about narrative authority, about who gets to tell whose story. It's also Faulkner being honest about the limitations of his own voice. That description of her reaction to the Easter sermon is breathtaking: "Dilsey sat bolt upright, her hand on Ben's knee. Two tears slid down her fallen cheeks, in and out of the myriad coruscations of immolation and abnegation and time." Faulkner has taken this simple moment of an elderly woman crying in church and transformed it into something almost mystical, her tears literally navigating through abstract concepts made visible as light.

The whole novel is haunted by time. Each character lives in a different temporal experience. The novel's structure reinforces this. Faulkner embeds the entire novel within Easter weekend, but he scrambles the chronology. We get Saturday, then the jump back to 1910 for Quentin's death, then Friday, then finally Sunday. It creates this powerful tension between the promise of resurrection that Easter represents and the Compson family's complete inability to access that redemption. The time motif is not just clever, it's structural, metaphysical. It defines the characters more deeply than any plot point.

Faulkner's prose often draws attention to itself, his phrasing and word choices are frequently poetic and/or stark. Consider this description from the final chapter. Dilsey is going by wagon to church and moves through the black section of Faulkner's fictitious Jefferson, Mississippi: "A street turned oil at right angles, descending, and became a dirt road. On either hand the land dropped more sharply, a broad flat dotted with small cabins whose weathered roofs were on a level with the crown of the road. They were set in small grassless plots littered with broken things, bricks, planks, crockery, things of a once utilitarian value." The street becomes this liquid, almost organic substance, and the literal descent becomes symbolic movement into a different realm entirely.

The book just slaps the reader around, particularly in the first chapter but throughout the novel, as Faulkner does whatever he pleases with language. He treats punctuation, italics, spacing, and typography as tools just as important as word choice or sentence structure. Those long stretches without commas or period or even question marks, create breathless, often viscerally overwhelming passages where thoughts tumble into each other without pause. Faulkner seems almost aggressive in his refusal to make things easy. He's forcing readers to work, to be active participants in creating meaning from these fractured, challenging texts.

All of this is interesting. It's even powerful in moments. But when I ask myself what really happens in the novel, it's not much. It's an atmosphere. A mood. A meditation on ruin.

For all this technical brilliance and linguistic experimentation, The Sound and the Fury strikes me as more of an experimental novel than an experiential one. You often feel like you're watching Faulkner work through formal problems and technical innovations rather than being drawn into a fully lived world. The Benjy section especially feels like an experiment in consciousness and narrative perspective. The innovation is impressive, but it keeps you somewhat outside the experience, analyzing the experiment rather than living it.

The story itself is really not much of a story at all. A lot happens inside the minds of the characters, but nothing much actually happens in the story itself. When you strip away all the technical innovation and linguistic pyrotechnics, you're left with something almost absurdly simple. Caddy's daughter, who is named Quentin, runs away from a dysfunctional family on Easter morning. The end.

The entire first section is essentially Benjy remembering his sister who left, the second section is Quentin obsessing over the same sister before killing himself, the third section is Jason being angry, cruel and arrogant while his niece plans her escape, and the fourth section is the aftermath of that escape. The real drama is all psychological and emotional. The "events" are mostly things that happened years ago that continue to reverberate through the characters' minds.

Racism and decay loom everywhere. The novel doesn't confront racism directly, but it is built on it. The Black characters exist mostly in the margins, yet they're the foundation the family stands on. Dilsey especially. That she gets no voice is the point. It's a book about white people falling apart, and Black endurance getting no credit. Sexuality too, particularly in Caddy's absence, becomes this mythic, toxic force. She's not a character, she's a symbol onto which the others project their pain, their longing, their twisted sense of purity. Especially Quentin. Caddy is the loss they can't recover from, the fall from grace, the Southern Eve.

And decay is everywhere. Moral, spiritual, familial, cultural. The Compsons aren't tragic in the grand sense. They're pathetic. They're not Lear-level fallen aristocrats. They're just a mess. There's nothing noble in their fall, only rot. Jason stealing from a kid, Quentin stuck in abstraction, Benjy neutered and moaning. The family is a haunted house, collapsing from within.

Because of this actual lack of narrative depth, I cannot place this novel among my favorite Faulkner works, despite it apparently being at or near the top of everyone else's list. I admire its boldness, its prose, even its humor, but the novel itself is not as good as Light in August or As I Lay Dying or Absalom, Absalom! in my opinion.

Light in August has that incredible sweep and scope, multiple storylines that actually build and interconnect, characters like Joe Christmas and Lena Grove who feel fully realized rather than experimental constructs. As I Lay Dying takes a similar experimental approach to consciousness and multiple perspectives, but it's all in service of this compelling, darkly comic quest that has real narrative momentum. The Bundren family's odyssey to bury Addie gives the technical innovation something substantial to serve.

Absalom, Absalom! offers that epic scope of Southern history, the Sutpen saga that actually has the dramatic weight to support all that dense, gorgeous prose. When Quentin and Shreve piece together Thomas Sutpen's story, you're getting both formal innovation and a tale that feels genuinely mythic in its proportions.

With The Sound and the Fury, the technique seems to overwhelm the story it's meant to serve. The novel becomes more about Faulkner proving he can revolutionize narrative technique than about creating a world you want to inhabit or return to. Those books breathe. They punch. The Sound and the Fury whispers and broods.

This gets at something important about the difference between a historically significant novel and a personally resonant one. The Sound and the Fury clearly changed American literature, influencing countless writers and breaking new ground. You can see its DNA in everything from Toni Morrison to Jennifer Egan. 

But that doesn’t mean it has to be the most rewarding Faulkner novel to actually read and reread. Technical innovation and literary ambition don’t automatically translate to a satisfying reading experience. Sometimes the most groundbreaking works are better appreciated than loved, better studied than enjoyed. Faulkner’s willingness to essentially reinvent the novel form in 1929 was extraordinarily brave and important. Whether it makes for his best novel is another question entirely.

The Sound and the Fury was a bold experiment, an important work, but not a great one. It left me thinking, but not shaken. Impressed, but not moved. It is much ado about something, but not something I find profound. I respect it. But, just as it turns out to be not as difficult a read as it first seems, it is not as impressive as I initially hoped either. For all its innovation, it ultimately left me with a sense of exhaustion more than revelation. 

Faulkner gave us a masterclass in fragmentation and ruin, but not much to hold onto once the dust settled. If the point is nothingness, I can get that from Sartre with less decoding. The Sound and the Fury may be a turning point in literature, but that doesn’t make it a great novel. It is a monumental failure of purpose—powerfully written, structurally inventive, but hollow at the center.

Still, it's a novel that every serious reader should grapple with, if only to understand what Faulkner accomplished and how it changed what fiction could do. And it is actually not as difficult to comprehend, after the first chapter, as some might lead you to believe. By its end the novel is downright accessible. But for pure reading pleasure, for that sense of being completely transported into another world, I'll take Lena Grove's travels or the Bundren family's dark comedy or the Gothic mysteries of Yoknapatawpha County. Sometimes the most experimental path isn't necessarily the most satisfying one. But, as with Ulysses or Neuromancer or Gravity's Rainbow, I'm glad I read The Sound and the Fury, but I'm over it now. I survived.

(Assisted by ChatGPT and Claude.)