What is The Sound and the Fury about?

The Sound and the Fury is widely considered Faulkner's greatest novel, and it is genuinely one of the most formally radical works in American fiction. Published in 1929, it tells the story of the decline of the Compson family — once aristocratic Mississippi gentry, now spiritually and materially ruined — through four separate narratives, each with a different narrator and a different relationship to time. Faulkner does not make this easy. He does not want it to be easy.

The first section is narrated by Benjy, a cognitively disabled man in his thirties who has no linear sense of time — past and present are equally vivid to him, and the narrative shifts between them without warning. The second is narrated by Quentin, a Harvard student on the day of his suicide, moving between present action and obsessive memory. The third is narrated by Jason, the most conventionally readable of the three — bitter, petty, and mean — as he processes his failures as a businessman and a man. The fourth shifts to a third-person omniscient perspective and centers on Dilsey, the Black servant who has held the family together and who witnesses, with something like compassion, its final collapse. The novel's famous conclusion at the Easter Sunday church service, where Dilsey weeps for "the first and the last," is often cited as among the most powerful endings in American fiction.

What Faulkner is doing formally is as important as what he is doing thematically: each narrator's relation to time is a portrait of consciousness, damage, and the South's collective inability to release the past. The Compson decline is the Civil War's long psychological aftermath. Quentin's obsession with his sister Caddy's lost honor is simultaneously personal grief and a meditation on what the white Southern aristocracy's honor code cost — the people it was imposed upon, and the men who enforced it.

This is a genuinely difficult novel. The Benjy section is famously disorienting on a first read; Faulkner wrote it in pencil, then added colored inks to help track the time shifts, none of which appear in print. Most readers benefit from a guide or a second read. But it is not difficult for difficulty's sake — the form is the content. To experience the novel's disorientation is to understand something about how the Compsons experience the past as inescapable and the present as a pale shadow of former glory.