The Sound and the Fury: The Novel That Broke the Rules

The first section of The Sound and the Fury (1929) is narrated by a thirty-three-year-old man with the mind of a small child, for whom past and present are the same, who cannot distinguish memory from the moment, so that the prose slides without warning across thirty years, from a sister’s wedding to a golf course to a childhood stream, with no signpost but a shift of italics. It is one of the most difficult openings in American literature, and readers have hurled the book across rooms for a century. But the difficulty is not perversity — it is Faulkner doing something no novelist had done: rendering consciousness itself, before it is sorted into sense, and asking the reader to assemble a shattered family’s tragedy from the fragments, exactly as we assemble meaning from the chaos of our own experience. Persevere, and it becomes one of the supreme achievements of the American novel.

Four ways to tell one story

Faulkner tells the fall of the Compsons — a decayed Southern aristocratic family — four times, through four utterly different consciousnesses. First Benjy, the “idiot” of the Shakespearean title (“a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”), whose timeless perception gives us the raw sensory material. Then Quentin, the doomed Harvard son obsessed with his sister’s lost honor and with time itself, on the day of his suicide, his section a torrent of anguished, disintegrating thought. Then Jason, the bitter, cruel surviving brother, whose hard clear meanness is a relief after the fog and a horror in itself. And finally a section told plainly, from outside, centered on Dilsey, the Black servant who endures — the one figure of wholeness in a broken white family. The same events refract through four minds, and only by holding all four together does the tragedy come clear.

The lost sister at the center

At the heart of all four sections is a woman who never gets one of her own: Caddy, the sister, whose fall from innocence — her sexuality, her disgrace, her banishment — obsesses each of her three brothers in his own way, and stands for everything the Compson family has lost. Faulkner said Caddy was the novel’s true subject, “the beautiful one,” and that he told the story four times because he could never get her right — she is only ever seen through the men who loved and failed and resented her. Around her absence the whole book turns: the decline of a family, a class, an old South rotten with pride and haunted by the past, unable to live in the present because it cannot stop grieving what it was.

The difficulty and the reward

Faulkner demanded of his reader what Joyce demanded — active assembly, patience, rereading — and for the same reason: that consciousness does not come pre-sorted, and a novel true to the mind must reproduce its chaos. The reward is a depth of immersion no conventional narrative can reach; when the four sections finally lock together, the effect is overwhelming, a whole doomed world felt from the inside. It is the cornerstone of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, the imaginary Mississippi county in which he built one of the great fictional universes, and a pillar of any account of the great American novel.

Why read it now

Because it is the most ambitious experiment in the American novel and one of its deepest tragedies — a book that repays difficulty as few do. Come to it ready to be lost at first, trust that the fog will clear, use a guide for the first section if you need one, and you will find yourself inside one of the permanent achievements of modern literature.

Frequently asked questions

Is the first section really that hard?

Yes — Benjy’s timeless narration is deliberately disorienting. Many readers use a guide that marks the time-shifts, or simply read on trusting that later sections clarify what the first withholds. The difficulty eases dramatically after the opening.

Do I need to know the American South?

It helps, but Faulkner supplies the world. The novel is set among the decayed Southern gentry after the Civil War, haunted by lost status and racial injustice; a good edition glosses the context, and the human tragedy is universal.

Where does it rank among American novels?

Near the very top. It is Faulkner’s breakthrough and, for many, his masterpiece, routinely named among the greatest American novels of the twentieth century and the finest achievement of Southern literature.

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and let the fog clear into one of the great American tragedies.