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The Sound and The Fury / As I Lay Dying
As I Lay Dying
Faulkner's famous tragic narrative of the Bundren family's trek across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother, is a true 20th-century masterpiece.
In terms of organisation, language, and drama, As I Lay Dying is one of the most important works in American fiction. The novel, which is told in turn by each member of the family, including Addie and others, fluctuates in mood from dark humour to deep pathos.
The Sound and the Fury
The Sound and the Fury, a provocative and perplexing novel by William Faulkner published in 1929, is largely regarded as one of the most important English-language novels of the twentieth century. This new Norton Critical Edition builds on the merits of its predecessors while paying special attention to the novel's contemporary reception as well as its diverse cultural and historical surroundings. The text for the Third Edition is based on Noel Polk's meticulously produced corrected text, which is preceded by a textual note. The annotations by David Minter, which were aimed to help readers understand complex phrases and allusions, have been kept.
Faulkner's famous tragic narrative of the Bundren family's trek across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother, is a true 20th-century masterpiece.
In terms of organisation, language, and drama, As I Lay Dying is one of the most important works in American fiction. The novel, which is told in turn by each member of the family, including Addie and others, fluctuates in mood from dark humour to deep pathos.
The Sound and the Fury
The Sound and the Fury, a provocative and perplexing novel by William Faulkner published in 1929, is largely regarded as one of the most important English-language novels of the twentieth century. This new Norton Critical Edition builds on the merits of its predecessors while paying special attention to the novel's contemporary reception as well as its diverse cultural and historical surroundings. The text for the Third Edition is based on Noel Polk's meticulously produced corrected text, which is preceded by a textual note. The annotations by David Minter, which were aimed to help readers understand complex phrases and allusions, have been kept.
532 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1946
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552 people want to read
About the author
William Faulkner
1,351 books10.7k followersWilliam Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer. He is best known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a stand-in for Lafayette County where he spent most of his life. A Nobel laureate, Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers of American literature and often is considered the greatest writer of Southern literature.
Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, and raised in Oxford, Mississippi. During World War I, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, but did not serve in combat. Returning to Oxford, he attended the University of Mississippi for three semesters before dropping out. He moved to New Orleans, where he wrote his first novel Soldiers' Pay (1925). He went back to Oxford and wrote Sartoris (1927), his first work set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. In 1929, he published The Sound and the Fury. The following year, he wrote As I Lay Dying. Later that decade, he wrote Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! and The Wild Palms. He also worked as a screenwriter, contributing to Howard Hawks's To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, adapted from Raymond Chandler's novel. The former film, adapted from Ernest Hemingway's novel, is the only film with contributions by two Nobel laureates.
Faulkner's reputation grew following publication of Malcolm Cowley's The Portable Faulkner, and he was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature for "his powerful and unique contribution to the modern American novel." He is the only Mississippi-born Nobel laureate. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Faulkner died from a heart attack on July 6, 1962, following a fall from his horse the month before. Ralph Ellison called him "the greatest artist the South has produced".
Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, and raised in Oxford, Mississippi. During World War I, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, but did not serve in combat. Returning to Oxford, he attended the University of Mississippi for three semesters before dropping out. He moved to New Orleans, where he wrote his first novel Soldiers' Pay (1925). He went back to Oxford and wrote Sartoris (1927), his first work set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. In 1929, he published The Sound and the Fury. The following year, he wrote As I Lay Dying. Later that decade, he wrote Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! and The Wild Palms. He also worked as a screenwriter, contributing to Howard Hawks's To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, adapted from Raymond Chandler's novel. The former film, adapted from Ernest Hemingway's novel, is the only film with contributions by two Nobel laureates.
Faulkner's reputation grew following publication of Malcolm Cowley's The Portable Faulkner, and he was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature for "his powerful and unique contribution to the modern American novel." He is the only Mississippi-born Nobel laureate. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Faulkner died from a heart attack on July 6, 1962, following a fall from his horse the month before. Ralph Ellison called him "the greatest artist the South has produced".
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
October 12, 2018
Didn't like at all. Faulkner's writing is so difficult to follow.
June 19, 2019
Southern Values
Everyone knows this can be a difficult book to read because the first three chapters use stream-of-consciousness in three different characters: the first is the “idiot” Benjy who lives in a world where past and present have no separation; the second is the neurotic Quentin whose world is based on defunct Southern values about women’s purity and honor that men need to protect; the third is Jason whose world is full of bitter self-pity and hatred of his siblings’ apparent success that drives him to destroy himself seeking vengeance. Each character has a different style of stream-of-consciousness, with Benjy’s being the most fragmented and incomprehensible to a reader without any knowledge of family events. That being the case, the reader could start with the third chapter which is Jason’s version of truth and is the easiest to comprehend, followed by Quentin’s chapter and then Benjy’s. However, starting with Benjy’s chaotic perceptions may also reflect the chaos of the Southern world, a chaos which has different manifestations in Quentin and Jason, each of whom exemplifies an aspect of a world that has been destroyed leaving this dysfunctional family as a remnant. Faulkner uses the spelling of words (no apostrophes for contractions), changes in punctuation and capitalization to reveal the characters’ internal states, especially noticeable for Benjy and toward the end of Quentin’s chapter when he is close to suicide. Another option is to go to the Faulkner Website athttp://cypress.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~egjb... and look at the novel’s clear synopsis, which includes a chronology of all the characters mentioned in the Appendix and in the novel. In addition, the Appendix clarifies some potentially vague points about the characters, such as, Quentin does not commit incest with Caddy, although he claims he did from a complex mixture of gentlemanly Southern behavior and repressed sexual desire, which the novel explores.
The Appendix relates the family history, which starts with the most ancient Compson ancestors and is filled with more defeats and mistakes in judgment than the few instances of success upon which the most recent family fortune is based. The family got its start as landed aristocracy thanks to one ancestor’s fortunate possession of a speedy mare, which enabled him to win money through betting on races and the sale of the mare to the Indian who owned the land where the Compson estate would be built. Subsequent ancestors had important positions in state government and the Confederacy, which didn’t leave much to show for their efforts except a vacuous prestige that the alcoholic father Jason III still esteems. Throughout the family history ancestors were on the losing side of conflicts, starting with a Scottish ancestor whose side lost to the side that won the English throne, and some of the modern-day familial remnants continue the pattern by siding with outdated codes of behavior (Quentin) or even worse exploiting one’s family because desire for money has replaced any family value (Jason). Moral deficiencies abound: Uncle Maury and Jason promote fruitless get-rich schemes;, Quentin bases his personal value on the outdated idea that family honor is vested in its women’s purity; Maury and the father are both alcoholics; the mother is full of the same self-pity that Jason displays; neither Caddy nor her daughter shows any social restraint, delighting in rebelliousness and promiscuity. The property is squandered to satisfy transient physical needs, the most egregious example being Quentin, who is sent to Harvard by selling off the last important parcel of land; after his first year he commits suicide because he cannot reconcile himself to his sister’s marriage and to the fact that he doesn’t fit in easily with the more worldly students he encounters there.
Faulkner’s picture of the South is a society that is coming apart because its values no longer have importance or cohesion. The previously dominant Southern class was the aristocratic, land-and-slave owners, who made decisions that controlled the rest of the society and enjoyed their prestige, power and financial security. But the reality of the twentieth century’s commercial world is that people have to earn their money by intelligence and hard work, whether it’s speculation on cotton or investing in a business rather than buying a car to enhance one’s self-importance as Jason does. Sarcastic complaints about life’s unfairness and racist slander of blacks are prime indicators of a character’s inability to get along in the post-Civil-War world, where inherited status will no longer ensure survival of a family that lives parasitically on the work of those without other options. Jason’s boast that his family owned slaves while the whites he’s talking to were simple store owners carries no weight--the slaves are long gone. Now his family is dependent for all their daily needs on the work of their devoted black servant Dilsey and her family. He jokes that Lincoln freed the slaves but he needs to be freed from the blacks (18), whom he despises, without realizing his family would collapse if his servants weren’t there to tend to Benjy, who can barely feed himself, and his complaining, sickly mother, a model of the frail Southern belle, now aged and infirm, having never learned to use her own skills but always submitting to the family’s males as if they alone can ensure the family’s well being.
Quentin is an intelligent boy doomed like the rest of his siblings by his inheritance. symbolized by his grandfather’s watch given by his father with the warning, “I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then…and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won...They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools” (95). This cryptic, cynical statement impels Quentin to thoughts of death as the only escape from time, which his father has stated will only show him the folly of his endeavors. Through a distorted Christianity he identifies with Saint Francis who spoke of “Little Sister Death, that never had a sister” (96), while Quentin has a sister who is now forever “dead” to him because of her marriage. He tries to have his Harvard year given to Jason, so he can remain at home and suffer from his delusion of having committed incest because in his disturbed mind, rather than accept his sister’s dishonorable promiscuity with unworthy men, he fantasizes he is the one who has had sex with her. When his pragmatic father explains that “men invented virginity…it’s like death; only a state in which the others are left” (97), Quentin won’t accept that virginity has no value, and he isn’t needed to defend his sister’s honor.
Because Quentin doesn’t go to prostitutes like the other boys at Harvard, Spoade mocks him by saying his roommate Shreve is his husband, a sexual aspersion that also indicates his inability to fit in with the morally nonchalant Spoade and his buddies, who don’t respect women and enjoy exploiting them (185). A further handicap is that Quentin (as well as Jason) has the same Southern disdain for blacks and mocks as a shiftless “nigger” (102) Deacon, a black man-of-all-trades who helps new students adjust to Harvard, although Quentin also reflects, “I suppose with all his petty chicanery and hypocrisy he stank no higher in heaven’s nostrils than any other” (117). He’s not sure how to behave toward blacks in the North (“You’ve got to remember to think of them as coloured people not niggers,” 105) because “a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behaviour; a sort of obverse reflections of the white people he lives among” (105), a self-serving comparison that by making a “nigger” always an incompetent, lazy, self-indulgent person means the white person is reassured of being the opposite. He even indulges the fantasy that blacks have “a fond and unflagging tolerance for whitefolks’ vagaries like that of a grandparent for unpredictable and troublesome children” (107), a complete disregard of the fact that blacks had no choice but to tolerate “whitefolks’ vagaries.” As Deacon says about Southerners, “They’re fine folks. But you cant live with them” (118). However, hidden behind the stereotypes is Quentin’s genuine attachment to Roskus and Dilsey, who have given him more human contact than his neurotic parents, and even a final grudging respect for Deacon’s helpfulness. Ironically, one young boy he meets thinks Quentin “talks like they do in minstrel shows” (139), which makes another boy wonder if he’ll be mad they think “he talks like a coloured man” (139).
Quentin’s attitude toward women is equally as problematic. He thinks he and his father have to “protect women from one another from themselves…Women are…born with a practical fertility of suspicion that makes a crop every so often and usually right they have an affinity for evil for supplying whatever the evil lacks in itself for drawing it about them instinctively” (115). This malign view of women may well reflect Faulkner’s own views, because in Light in August a similar general attitude about most women is prevalent, excepting of course the virginal ……….. However, excepting his sister’s promiscuity, Quentin provides no example of evil female behavior, and it is the Harvard boys who behave with thoughtless cruelty. His cynical father claims “Women are never virgins. Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature.” Virginity is just words, and one knows this “On the instant when we come to realise that tragedy is second-hand” (135). This isn’t satisfactory for Quentin, as he wants to be in a “hell beyond that: the clean flame the two of us more than dead. Then you will have only me then only me then the two of us amid the pointing and the horror beyond the clean flame” (135). When he tries to convince Caddy they’ve had sex, she realizes he’s still a virgin and has no idea of her powerful sexual urges, “yes I hate him I would die for him I’ve already died for him I die for him over and over again everytime this goes” (170). She has him hold his hand where he can feel her blood pulsing when she thinks of her lover; even more embarrassing, Quentin meets Caddy’s lover, challenges, and hits him, then passes out before the other man does anything. His father sums up Quentin’s false admission of incest because “you wanted to sublimate a piece of natural human folly into a horror and then exorcise it with truth…you are not thinking of finitude you are contemplating an apotheosis in which a temporary state of mind will become (195) symmetrical above the flesh and aware both of itself and of the flesh it will not quite discard you will not even be dead” (196). This abstract, almost Scholastic analysis of Caddy’s sin and Quentin’s need to expiate it provides little relief; his father is even more pessimistic that a person doesn’t decide to end his life until “he has realized that even the despair or remorse or bereavement is not particularly important to the dark diceman…you will not do that until you come to believe that even she was not quite worth despair” (196). Quentin, the “half-baked Galahad” (129) who can’t fit into Harvard society and knows he can’t return home, hasn’t been able to stop time and start to live. He drowns himself, perhaps to show his father that his action demonstrates that “whether or not you consider it courageous is of more importance than the act itself” (195).
As for Candace (Caddy), her adventurous, high spirits are also out of place in her family. Southern girls are expected to follow rigid, timorous routines and norms, not climb trees her brothers are afraid to tackle. As for being sexually adventurous, which boys might be allowed, that too is anathema. However, her anxious, ineffectual brother Quentin is attracted to her spirit, as if she might supply the missing part of himself, which is part of the reason for his deep, spiritual attraction to her. Of course, that becomes mixed up with sexual desire because Southern society rarely recognized any male-female relationships that weren’t based upon sex; deep, platonic friendship with a female, even a sibling, wasn’t an option. (Jason shows the Southern male’s disdain for women as equals when he complains that he would rather Quentin’s lover had stolen his money than a girl.) After Caddy is quickly married off to a socially suitable candidate to hide the fact that she’s pregnant with her lower-class lover’s child, Quentin is unable to accept this reality which prompts his own anxious decline. By offering himself as the responsible party he blindly believes that divine punishment will send them both to hell where he can be joined with her in their own personal Inferno. Of course, this fantasy cannot happen, and his father understands his son’s sickly morality, which his own cynical atheism cannot help or supplant. Once Caddy’s child is born, and she is quickly cast off by her husband, who had been apprised of Caddy’s premarital behavior by the envious Jason, the situation becomes more complex. Caddy’s mother takes in the homeless child, since Caddy’s husband won’t support a child that is not his, but the morally rigid mother decides that her disgraced daughter’s name will never be spoken to her child, as if this somehow will prove that her daughter no longer exists, when in fact she is sending money to support her daughter Quentin, named in honor of her brother. This is an interesting continuation of the siblings’ “incestuous” relationship because in this family naming a person after an ancestor is both an honor and an expectation they will live up to their model.
However, this gesture, while intended to honor Quentin, simply results in increased scorn for the girl as inheritor of both her mother’s lascivious conduct and her uncle’s mental instability (277). Especially for the mother names are important carriers of tradition and honor, and she insists that full names be used because she considers nicknames “vulgar. Only common people use them” (82). When it’s clear that Benjy is an idiot, she insists he be renamed from Maury (to honor her brother) to Benjamin, a name Quentin proposed, the last son, sold into Egyptian slavery according to the Bible. All the servants think this is a bad idea, and Roskus, one of the older servants, insists changing names is a clear sign the family won’t have any luck (49). Versh, a younger servant, says that by changing his name they’ve made him into a “bluegum” (a very dark black man with blue gums, 88), not a literal result, but an indication no good will come to him.
For his part, sarcastic Jason uses every opportunity to verbally and physically abuse seventeen-year-old Quentin and make her life as miserable as his own by engineering a scheme whereby the money Caddy sends for Quentin’s needs is diverted into his own secret hoard (which is later stolen by Quentin). Caddy is aware Jason can’t be trusted, but she has no option other than to use him because her mother is adamantly opposed to letting her in the house or near her daughter. When she tries one time to see her baby, Jason demands money and then cruelly ensures that she sees the child only as it’s being driven past her (221). Afterwards, he admits, “I didn’t feel so bad. I says I reckon that’ll show you. I reckon you’ll know now that you cant beat me out of a job and get away with it” (223), which is another of his self-indulgent lies, for he ruined his chance of getting a job at Caddy’s husband’s bank by maliciously telling him that Caddy was pregnant by another man. Her need for Jason’s help means he can torment her about the child and complain endlessly to the house about supporting Quentin, who won’t submit to his authority and proves as sexually adventurous as her mother, freely trumpeting her defiance, “I’m bad and I’m going to hell, and I don’t care. I’d rather be in hell than anywhere where you are” (207). When she runs off with a carnival worker in a red tie, Jason spends a whole day chasing them in his car, despite his debilitating migraine due to the gasoline fumes. He seems “to get an actual pleasure out of his outrage and impotence” (319), which compel him to capture and punish her for her sexual sins (an extension of his mother’s Puritanical ideas pushed to an obsessive degree), a drive so dominant that he pursues her until he becomes incapacitated, unwilling to allow a girl to deceive and disobey him.
Jason is not only openly abusive of his family but also any black person or foreigner, whom he accuses of exploiting Americans and taking their jobs. He taunts Luster with a ticket to the carnival, saying he can have it for a nickel, which he knows the boy doesn’t have, and then burns the ticket in front of the boy’s eyes. His main concern is not losing money to exploitative Jews or Easterners, and he constantly points out what others are doing that loses them money; at one point his mother wavers and is willing to accept Caddy’s checks (“the wages of sin,” 239), but he warns her, “What would be the good in beginning now, when you’ve been destroying them for fifteen years?..If you keep on doing it, you have lost nothing, but if you’d begin to take them now, you’ll have lost fifty thousand dollars” (237), an odd, distorted reasoning. He speculates on cotton but is so inept that he quickly loses everything. As for fellow Americans, he enjoys hearing about their failures and troubles, and torments customers who don’t have a lot of money (213), which gives him a transitory feeling of being more successful. Except for his mother, whom he needs to complain to and because she gives him status as the head of the household, he treats women without respect.
Southern values have been inverted into weapons that destroy the family they originally supported, whether through obsessive belief in their validity, as demonstrated by Quentin’s suicide, or through active enforcement as Jason does. Supported by his mother who insists he must be obeyed without challenge (276), he demands complete obedience from all family members and servants. As a young child Jason slept in Damuddy’s bed and was so spoiled his mother needed two years for him to outgrow it (82). In addition, from the beginning she constantly commended him as the practical person, the one who had inherited her family’s abilities, the only one she could depend upon, never needing any proof of his ability. In fact, he slacks off at his job and mouths off at the owner, who keeps him on only because he respects his mother. His authoritarian tendencies, buttressed by a sense of superiority unsupported by reality, put the finishing touches to a family that is morally fragile and intellectually unable to change to new, potentially more successful ways of behaving. The fact they refuse to acknowledge their need for change makes their decline less a tragedy and more a comedy of manners and misplaced expectations, as Faulkner’s tone throughout this novel and in his Appendix indicates....According to Shakespeare, the “sound and the fury” is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. Faulkner has done a masterful job applying the guilty Macbeth’s despairing statement to this novel, while wrapping it in a more compassionate Christian symbology. But this is not a tragedy that results in greater self-knowledge. What the Compsons have done is what the boys in Boston did when talking of their fishing spots: "making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, than an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words."
Everyone knows this can be a difficult book to read because the first three chapters use stream-of-consciousness in three different characters: the first is the “idiot” Benjy who lives in a world where past and present have no separation; the second is the neurotic Quentin whose world is based on defunct Southern values about women’s purity and honor that men need to protect; the third is Jason whose world is full of bitter self-pity and hatred of his siblings’ apparent success that drives him to destroy himself seeking vengeance. Each character has a different style of stream-of-consciousness, with Benjy’s being the most fragmented and incomprehensible to a reader without any knowledge of family events. That being the case, the reader could start with the third chapter which is Jason’s version of truth and is the easiest to comprehend, followed by Quentin’s chapter and then Benjy’s. However, starting with Benjy’s chaotic perceptions may also reflect the chaos of the Southern world, a chaos which has different manifestations in Quentin and Jason, each of whom exemplifies an aspect of a world that has been destroyed leaving this dysfunctional family as a remnant. Faulkner uses the spelling of words (no apostrophes for contractions), changes in punctuation and capitalization to reveal the characters’ internal states, especially noticeable for Benjy and toward the end of Quentin’s chapter when he is close to suicide. Another option is to go to the Faulkner Website athttp://cypress.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~egjb... and look at the novel’s clear synopsis, which includes a chronology of all the characters mentioned in the Appendix and in the novel. In addition, the Appendix clarifies some potentially vague points about the characters, such as, Quentin does not commit incest with Caddy, although he claims he did from a complex mixture of gentlemanly Southern behavior and repressed sexual desire, which the novel explores.
The Appendix relates the family history, which starts with the most ancient Compson ancestors and is filled with more defeats and mistakes in judgment than the few instances of success upon which the most recent family fortune is based. The family got its start as landed aristocracy thanks to one ancestor’s fortunate possession of a speedy mare, which enabled him to win money through betting on races and the sale of the mare to the Indian who owned the land where the Compson estate would be built. Subsequent ancestors had important positions in state government and the Confederacy, which didn’t leave much to show for their efforts except a vacuous prestige that the alcoholic father Jason III still esteems. Throughout the family history ancestors were on the losing side of conflicts, starting with a Scottish ancestor whose side lost to the side that won the English throne, and some of the modern-day familial remnants continue the pattern by siding with outdated codes of behavior (Quentin) or even worse exploiting one’s family because desire for money has replaced any family value (Jason). Moral deficiencies abound: Uncle Maury and Jason promote fruitless get-rich schemes;, Quentin bases his personal value on the outdated idea that family honor is vested in its women’s purity; Maury and the father are both alcoholics; the mother is full of the same self-pity that Jason displays; neither Caddy nor her daughter shows any social restraint, delighting in rebelliousness and promiscuity. The property is squandered to satisfy transient physical needs, the most egregious example being Quentin, who is sent to Harvard by selling off the last important parcel of land; after his first year he commits suicide because he cannot reconcile himself to his sister’s marriage and to the fact that he doesn’t fit in easily with the more worldly students he encounters there.
Faulkner’s picture of the South is a society that is coming apart because its values no longer have importance or cohesion. The previously dominant Southern class was the aristocratic, land-and-slave owners, who made decisions that controlled the rest of the society and enjoyed their prestige, power and financial security. But the reality of the twentieth century’s commercial world is that people have to earn their money by intelligence and hard work, whether it’s speculation on cotton or investing in a business rather than buying a car to enhance one’s self-importance as Jason does. Sarcastic complaints about life’s unfairness and racist slander of blacks are prime indicators of a character’s inability to get along in the post-Civil-War world, where inherited status will no longer ensure survival of a family that lives parasitically on the work of those without other options. Jason’s boast that his family owned slaves while the whites he’s talking to were simple store owners carries no weight--the slaves are long gone. Now his family is dependent for all their daily needs on the work of their devoted black servant Dilsey and her family. He jokes that Lincoln freed the slaves but he needs to be freed from the blacks (18), whom he despises, without realizing his family would collapse if his servants weren’t there to tend to Benjy, who can barely feed himself, and his complaining, sickly mother, a model of the frail Southern belle, now aged and infirm, having never learned to use her own skills but always submitting to the family’s males as if they alone can ensure the family’s well being.
Quentin is an intelligent boy doomed like the rest of his siblings by his inheritance. symbolized by his grandfather’s watch given by his father with the warning, “I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then…and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won...They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools” (95). This cryptic, cynical statement impels Quentin to thoughts of death as the only escape from time, which his father has stated will only show him the folly of his endeavors. Through a distorted Christianity he identifies with Saint Francis who spoke of “Little Sister Death, that never had a sister” (96), while Quentin has a sister who is now forever “dead” to him because of her marriage. He tries to have his Harvard year given to Jason, so he can remain at home and suffer from his delusion of having committed incest because in his disturbed mind, rather than accept his sister’s dishonorable promiscuity with unworthy men, he fantasizes he is the one who has had sex with her. When his pragmatic father explains that “men invented virginity…it’s like death; only a state in which the others are left” (97), Quentin won’t accept that virginity has no value, and he isn’t needed to defend his sister’s honor.
Because Quentin doesn’t go to prostitutes like the other boys at Harvard, Spoade mocks him by saying his roommate Shreve is his husband, a sexual aspersion that also indicates his inability to fit in with the morally nonchalant Spoade and his buddies, who don’t respect women and enjoy exploiting them (185). A further handicap is that Quentin (as well as Jason) has the same Southern disdain for blacks and mocks as a shiftless “nigger” (102) Deacon, a black man-of-all-trades who helps new students adjust to Harvard, although Quentin also reflects, “I suppose with all his petty chicanery and hypocrisy he stank no higher in heaven’s nostrils than any other” (117). He’s not sure how to behave toward blacks in the North (“You’ve got to remember to think of them as coloured people not niggers,” 105) because “a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behaviour; a sort of obverse reflections of the white people he lives among” (105), a self-serving comparison that by making a “nigger” always an incompetent, lazy, self-indulgent person means the white person is reassured of being the opposite. He even indulges the fantasy that blacks have “a fond and unflagging tolerance for whitefolks’ vagaries like that of a grandparent for unpredictable and troublesome children” (107), a complete disregard of the fact that blacks had no choice but to tolerate “whitefolks’ vagaries.” As Deacon says about Southerners, “They’re fine folks. But you cant live with them” (118). However, hidden behind the stereotypes is Quentin’s genuine attachment to Roskus and Dilsey, who have given him more human contact than his neurotic parents, and even a final grudging respect for Deacon’s helpfulness. Ironically, one young boy he meets thinks Quentin “talks like they do in minstrel shows” (139), which makes another boy wonder if he’ll be mad they think “he talks like a coloured man” (139).
Quentin’s attitude toward women is equally as problematic. He thinks he and his father have to “protect women from one another from themselves…Women are…born with a practical fertility of suspicion that makes a crop every so often and usually right they have an affinity for evil for supplying whatever the evil lacks in itself for drawing it about them instinctively” (115). This malign view of women may well reflect Faulkner’s own views, because in Light in August a similar general attitude about most women is prevalent, excepting of course the virginal ……….. However, excepting his sister’s promiscuity, Quentin provides no example of evil female behavior, and it is the Harvard boys who behave with thoughtless cruelty. His cynical father claims “Women are never virgins. Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature.” Virginity is just words, and one knows this “On the instant when we come to realise that tragedy is second-hand” (135). This isn’t satisfactory for Quentin, as he wants to be in a “hell beyond that: the clean flame the two of us more than dead. Then you will have only me then only me then the two of us amid the pointing and the horror beyond the clean flame” (135). When he tries to convince Caddy they’ve had sex, she realizes he’s still a virgin and has no idea of her powerful sexual urges, “yes I hate him I would die for him I’ve already died for him I die for him over and over again everytime this goes” (170). She has him hold his hand where he can feel her blood pulsing when she thinks of her lover; even more embarrassing, Quentin meets Caddy’s lover, challenges, and hits him, then passes out before the other man does anything. His father sums up Quentin’s false admission of incest because “you wanted to sublimate a piece of natural human folly into a horror and then exorcise it with truth…you are not thinking of finitude you are contemplating an apotheosis in which a temporary state of mind will become (195) symmetrical above the flesh and aware both of itself and of the flesh it will not quite discard you will not even be dead” (196). This abstract, almost Scholastic analysis of Caddy’s sin and Quentin’s need to expiate it provides little relief; his father is even more pessimistic that a person doesn’t decide to end his life until “he has realized that even the despair or remorse or bereavement is not particularly important to the dark diceman…you will not do that until you come to believe that even she was not quite worth despair” (196). Quentin, the “half-baked Galahad” (129) who can’t fit into Harvard society and knows he can’t return home, hasn’t been able to stop time and start to live. He drowns himself, perhaps to show his father that his action demonstrates that “whether or not you consider it courageous is of more importance than the act itself” (195).
As for Candace (Caddy), her adventurous, high spirits are also out of place in her family. Southern girls are expected to follow rigid, timorous routines and norms, not climb trees her brothers are afraid to tackle. As for being sexually adventurous, which boys might be allowed, that too is anathema. However, her anxious, ineffectual brother Quentin is attracted to her spirit, as if she might supply the missing part of himself, which is part of the reason for his deep, spiritual attraction to her. Of course, that becomes mixed up with sexual desire because Southern society rarely recognized any male-female relationships that weren’t based upon sex; deep, platonic friendship with a female, even a sibling, wasn’t an option. (Jason shows the Southern male’s disdain for women as equals when he complains that he would rather Quentin’s lover had stolen his money than a girl.) After Caddy is quickly married off to a socially suitable candidate to hide the fact that she’s pregnant with her lower-class lover’s child, Quentin is unable to accept this reality which prompts his own anxious decline. By offering himself as the responsible party he blindly believes that divine punishment will send them both to hell where he can be joined with her in their own personal Inferno. Of course, this fantasy cannot happen, and his father understands his son’s sickly morality, which his own cynical atheism cannot help or supplant. Once Caddy’s child is born, and she is quickly cast off by her husband, who had been apprised of Caddy’s premarital behavior by the envious Jason, the situation becomes more complex. Caddy’s mother takes in the homeless child, since Caddy’s husband won’t support a child that is not his, but the morally rigid mother decides that her disgraced daughter’s name will never be spoken to her child, as if this somehow will prove that her daughter no longer exists, when in fact she is sending money to support her daughter Quentin, named in honor of her brother. This is an interesting continuation of the siblings’ “incestuous” relationship because in this family naming a person after an ancestor is both an honor and an expectation they will live up to their model.
However, this gesture, while intended to honor Quentin, simply results in increased scorn for the girl as inheritor of both her mother’s lascivious conduct and her uncle’s mental instability (277). Especially for the mother names are important carriers of tradition and honor, and she insists that full names be used because she considers nicknames “vulgar. Only common people use them” (82). When it’s clear that Benjy is an idiot, she insists he be renamed from Maury (to honor her brother) to Benjamin, a name Quentin proposed, the last son, sold into Egyptian slavery according to the Bible. All the servants think this is a bad idea, and Roskus, one of the older servants, insists changing names is a clear sign the family won’t have any luck (49). Versh, a younger servant, says that by changing his name they’ve made him into a “bluegum” (a very dark black man with blue gums, 88), not a literal result, but an indication no good will come to him.
For his part, sarcastic Jason uses every opportunity to verbally and physically abuse seventeen-year-old Quentin and make her life as miserable as his own by engineering a scheme whereby the money Caddy sends for Quentin’s needs is diverted into his own secret hoard (which is later stolen by Quentin). Caddy is aware Jason can’t be trusted, but she has no option other than to use him because her mother is adamantly opposed to letting her in the house or near her daughter. When she tries one time to see her baby, Jason demands money and then cruelly ensures that she sees the child only as it’s being driven past her (221). Afterwards, he admits, “I didn’t feel so bad. I says I reckon that’ll show you. I reckon you’ll know now that you cant beat me out of a job and get away with it” (223), which is another of his self-indulgent lies, for he ruined his chance of getting a job at Caddy’s husband’s bank by maliciously telling him that Caddy was pregnant by another man. Her need for Jason’s help means he can torment her about the child and complain endlessly to the house about supporting Quentin, who won’t submit to his authority and proves as sexually adventurous as her mother, freely trumpeting her defiance, “I’m bad and I’m going to hell, and I don’t care. I’d rather be in hell than anywhere where you are” (207). When she runs off with a carnival worker in a red tie, Jason spends a whole day chasing them in his car, despite his debilitating migraine due to the gasoline fumes. He seems “to get an actual pleasure out of his outrage and impotence” (319), which compel him to capture and punish her for her sexual sins (an extension of his mother’s Puritanical ideas pushed to an obsessive degree), a drive so dominant that he pursues her until he becomes incapacitated, unwilling to allow a girl to deceive and disobey him.
Jason is not only openly abusive of his family but also any black person or foreigner, whom he accuses of exploiting Americans and taking their jobs. He taunts Luster with a ticket to the carnival, saying he can have it for a nickel, which he knows the boy doesn’t have, and then burns the ticket in front of the boy’s eyes. His main concern is not losing money to exploitative Jews or Easterners, and he constantly points out what others are doing that loses them money; at one point his mother wavers and is willing to accept Caddy’s checks (“the wages of sin,” 239), but he warns her, “What would be the good in beginning now, when you’ve been destroying them for fifteen years?..If you keep on doing it, you have lost nothing, but if you’d begin to take them now, you’ll have lost fifty thousand dollars” (237), an odd, distorted reasoning. He speculates on cotton but is so inept that he quickly loses everything. As for fellow Americans, he enjoys hearing about their failures and troubles, and torments customers who don’t have a lot of money (213), which gives him a transitory feeling of being more successful. Except for his mother, whom he needs to complain to and because she gives him status as the head of the household, he treats women without respect.
Southern values have been inverted into weapons that destroy the family they originally supported, whether through obsessive belief in their validity, as demonstrated by Quentin’s suicide, or through active enforcement as Jason does. Supported by his mother who insists he must be obeyed without challenge (276), he demands complete obedience from all family members and servants. As a young child Jason slept in Damuddy’s bed and was so spoiled his mother needed two years for him to outgrow it (82). In addition, from the beginning she constantly commended him as the practical person, the one who had inherited her family’s abilities, the only one she could depend upon, never needing any proof of his ability. In fact, he slacks off at his job and mouths off at the owner, who keeps him on only because he respects his mother. His authoritarian tendencies, buttressed by a sense of superiority unsupported by reality, put the finishing touches to a family that is morally fragile and intellectually unable to change to new, potentially more successful ways of behaving. The fact they refuse to acknowledge their need for change makes their decline less a tragedy and more a comedy of manners and misplaced expectations, as Faulkner’s tone throughout this novel and in his Appendix indicates....According to Shakespeare, the “sound and the fury” is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. Faulkner has done a masterful job applying the guilty Macbeth’s despairing statement to this novel, while wrapping it in a more compassionate Christian symbology. But this is not a tragedy that results in greater self-knowledge. What the Compsons have done is what the boys in Boston did when talking of their fishing spots: "making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, than an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words."
June 21, 2013
Probably one of the most exhaustingly relentless books I've ever read. (I only read "The Sound the Fury," there were no editions available on Goodreads for the first book alone). Faulkner's novel demonstrates the fall and then plummet of the children of an aristocratic Southern family in the early 20th century--the painfully depressed oldest son Quentin, the doomed beauty Caddy, the embittered, distrustful Jason, and Benjy, the youngest, who is mentally disabled yet the only person who finds any sense of joy in this self-destructive family, but only because he is so sadly unable to understand the world around him.
The story is broken down into four chapters, one chapter for each of the Compson brothers and the last by their faithful and undervalued servant Dilsey. The book itself has a few distinct themes--the passing of time, the concept of purity, the inevitability of the characters' (specifically Quentin and Caddy's) failure to successfully interact and survive in a world whose values oppose their own. However, it's the book style that has cemented the book as a great American novel. Two chapters are mostly written using stream of consciousness, which is a very challenging style to read and understand. Memories blur into contemporary events which blur into different memories--sentences will drag on or turn into series of thoughts, occasionally punctuation will completely vanish with the increasing emotional distress of the character. The effect is that the novel is both equally disorienting as well as intensely personal.
I would recommend reading this book with a SparkNotes or something like it, as this can help with the first two chapters, which are the most difficult. This is without doubt a challenging book but it is a masterpiece of literary style.
The story is broken down into four chapters, one chapter for each of the Compson brothers and the last by their faithful and undervalued servant Dilsey. The book itself has a few distinct themes--the passing of time, the concept of purity, the inevitability of the characters' (specifically Quentin and Caddy's) failure to successfully interact and survive in a world whose values oppose their own. However, it's the book style that has cemented the book as a great American novel. Two chapters are mostly written using stream of consciousness, which is a very challenging style to read and understand. Memories blur into contemporary events which blur into different memories--sentences will drag on or turn into series of thoughts, occasionally punctuation will completely vanish with the increasing emotional distress of the character. The effect is that the novel is both equally disorienting as well as intensely personal.
I would recommend reading this book with a SparkNotes or something like it, as this can help with the first two chapters, which are the most difficult. This is without doubt a challenging book but it is a masterpiece of literary style.
October 1, 2010
"As I Lay Dying" is the Faulkner story that has stuck with me the most over the years, though "The Sound and The Fury" was the first Faulkner I ever read, -it inspired me to read more of his work, and of course, it's a classic! 5 thumbs up!
September 17, 2024
🐐🐐🐐 using this to document my third read through of The Sound and the Fury. A foundational text for ur boy. I often tout this as the novel that got me into literature, seriously — the first time I read Faulkner in 2018 was the first time I saw myself in the pages of great literature. Ain’t ever felt that resonance before. The second time, I was focused on the composition of the book, trying to make sure I “got it.” That I understood the jumps in time, the overlapping portions of narrative in the various sections, the delicate balance of generational echoes and present pressures. This third time, I once again felt a familiarity with the characters and a sympathy for their perspectives, but it was…sickening. Faulkner nails the South and its faults, and I realized the most powerful sections were the ones that spoke directly to the more noxious parts of my personality
Daddy Compton’s vain existential pronouncements? I done that shit from time to time. Quentin’s dislocation upon moving north, the alienation he inhabits without the mooring of his home? Every fucking time I leave North Carolina for more than a week. Mrs Compson’s stubborn pride in her family’s name? My whole lineage. Jason Compson’s cynicism on account of wasted opportunity, exploitative economics? I’ve hated cosmopolitan carpet baggers ever since having to deal with New Jerseyans at school, and couldn’t become a cog in the wheels of capitalism to save my life. The Compson family composes a potent blend of southern identity — the corrosive mixture of pride, anger, and commitment to the soil. I see myself all through the pages, and don’t like it.
Which I reckon makes it good ass literature. Holding that filthy mirror up to my culture, never shying away from the conservatism, racism, and bitterness that afflict this region. And writing like an ANGEL the whole time, dammit. Even in 2024, Faulkner’s prose is avant-garde. Clipped dialogue, surreal images, fractured consciousnesses, nonlinear narration…and just to make sure you know it’s on purpose, occasional moments of legitimate beauty. Crystalline prose depicting a natural scene or the rare, rare nugget of redeeming humanity. You’d still be hard pressed to find a novel that pushes the boundaries of the English language this far in 2024.
And the Benjy Compson section is just…I could rant about those 60 pages of writing for hours. Direct line from Shakespeare to Proust to the bass Ackward South. A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Sensory associations catalyzing the dramatics, ala Marcel. And absolutely stupid, like everything else south of the Mason-Dixon Line. That constellation of memories contains everything, the entire story. It’s pure genius.
I love this book. This book makes me hate parts of myself. I will keep returning to it every few years for the rest of my life. Shit gets me fired up like nothing else
Daddy Compton’s vain existential pronouncements? I done that shit from time to time. Quentin’s dislocation upon moving north, the alienation he inhabits without the mooring of his home? Every fucking time I leave North Carolina for more than a week. Mrs Compson’s stubborn pride in her family’s name? My whole lineage. Jason Compson’s cynicism on account of wasted opportunity, exploitative economics? I’ve hated cosmopolitan carpet baggers ever since having to deal with New Jerseyans at school, and couldn’t become a cog in the wheels of capitalism to save my life. The Compson family composes a potent blend of southern identity — the corrosive mixture of pride, anger, and commitment to the soil. I see myself all through the pages, and don’t like it.
Which I reckon makes it good ass literature. Holding that filthy mirror up to my culture, never shying away from the conservatism, racism, and bitterness that afflict this region. And writing like an ANGEL the whole time, dammit. Even in 2024, Faulkner’s prose is avant-garde. Clipped dialogue, surreal images, fractured consciousnesses, nonlinear narration…and just to make sure you know it’s on purpose, occasional moments of legitimate beauty. Crystalline prose depicting a natural scene or the rare, rare nugget of redeeming humanity. You’d still be hard pressed to find a novel that pushes the boundaries of the English language this far in 2024.
And the Benjy Compson section is just…I could rant about those 60 pages of writing for hours. Direct line from Shakespeare to Proust to the bass Ackward South. A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Sensory associations catalyzing the dramatics, ala Marcel. And absolutely stupid, like everything else south of the Mason-Dixon Line. That constellation of memories contains everything, the entire story. It’s pure genius.
I love this book. This book makes me hate parts of myself. I will keep returning to it every few years for the rest of my life. Shit gets me fired up like nothing else
March 9, 2023
AS I Lay Dying--2.5 stars
As I Lay Dying is a strange book for me to write about. Something in its essence seemed to hide just around the corners of the pages, just out of my grasp. I got the impression that had I been raised in the South the meaning that eluded me would have shined through. Something behind the attitude of the people towards each other, their sensibilities, the interactions between characters seemed to go over my head even as I struggled to comprehend what I could sense of its significance.
I got the distinct sense that this novel, whether intentionally or not, wasn't really written for me, but rather, as part of the 'our stories' canon. There is, naturally, no rule of authorship that every work of fiction should be aimed at the widest possible demographic, and having read it as an outsider I respect it, and respectfully didn't ~get it~.
That being said, the dry but nevertheless absurdist humor was not lost on me, and it's what I'll most fondly take away from this reading experience.
From 'my mother is a fish' to the mishaps on the 'if it can go wrong, it will go wrong' plot itself, to the little peculiarities of Anse with his stubborn determination to obey his wife's wishes to be buried in her hometown, Darl and his eventual pyromania, the big reveal from Addie herself. Some of the little flourishes within the characterizations were quite delightful.
However, though there may indeed be elements I cannot judge as good or bad, some of the technical aspects left a bit to be desired. The pacing of the front half of As I Lay Dying is painfully slow--I indeed felt as though by the time I got through it would be as I lay dying.
Regarding the writing itself: Faulkner is clearly a master of words, and capable of writing stunning passages, but because the conceit of this novel hinged on his ability to write each section in-character, some of that beautiful language took me out of the story. Suddenly I wasn't reading Darl's account of something happening, but rather, I was reading Faulkner describe something.
Overall, I'm glad I read this novel, and in fact I've turned around to read The Sound and the Fury to give Faulkner a fair blow since I did enjoy his writing, just not the way that it interrupted his storytelling.
The Sound and the Fury--3.5 starsMy initial reading experience of The Sound and the Fury was greatly colored by having just read As I Lay Dying.
Here, Faulkner seems to be exploring many of the same preoccupations: the decay of family/The South. Here, though, unlike As I Lay Dying, I felt like I ~got~ it. Perhaps it was the more direct interplay of the characters with people outside of their family/class/race, but something about this made much more sense out of As I Lay Dying.
This formerly very aristocratic family attempting and failing to reconcile the decline of The South, the way certain ideologies and attitudes don't seem able to survive in the 'new' South, the place of Black folks in the 'new' South. These things all really shine through in The Sound and the Fury. So too does the micro-level family drama centered around Caddy.
Plot-wise I thought this was a nice exploration of the American, Southern family at the time, and some of the scenes, particularly in Quentin's POV section, are stunningly beautiful pieces of writing that had me racing to find my quote notebook and a pen. Faulkner's little quips and insights through the mouthpiece of the family patriarch are also worth noting:
"It used to be a gentleman was known by his books; nowadays he is known by the ones he has not returned."
"Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life."
Jason's (and to some extent Quentin's too) section brings in more of the humor we got in As I Lay Dying, this time largely tied to his mad hunt for Miss Quentin:
"So when I looked around the door the first thing I saw was this red tie he had on and I was thinking what the hell kind of a man would wear a red tie."
"And there I was, without any hat, looking like I was crazy."
We also get this great follow-up scene wherein he goes blundering into the woods after her and sets his hand on some poison ivy. Without even bothering to remove his hand, he thinks to himself that at least it wasn't a snake.
I had a really great time reading those middle two sections, but alas, those they were book-ended by left much to be desired, and are what brings my overall rating of the book to 3.5
Given the experimental nature of a stream of consciousness novel, particularly at this time, it comes as no surprise that it's divisive. I fall on the end of the spectrum that didn't derive much pleasure from the opening section led by our POV character, Benji.
Getting through those first 100 pages felt like a challenge, rather than something I looked forward to. I had the benefit of this edition placing the Appendix at the beginning rather than the ending for which I'm incredibly grateful, however, reading through Benji's eyes was a slog. I can see why there are those that admire the ambition, but I felt it was just unbearably difficult to follow, even with the help of the appendix so that I at least knew going in there were two characters name Quentin from two different generations.
Upon reflection, something that made the journey not seem worth it was the writing itself, focused largely on relaying dialogue to help the reader puzzle-piece the narrative together. Ironically, the thing that made this section ultimately more frustrating was the for all that the structure of it was very true to stream of consciousness, it was utterly lacking in voice. I had no real sense of Benji's personality or motivations by the end of this. Strange, considering how fleshed out and real everyone else feels. The ending too, felt a bit lackluster and emotionless.
Everything else in The Sound and the Fury feels incredibly, meticulously intentional, so I've no doubt Faulkner put a lot of thought into the aforementioned two sections, they just didn't work for me.
That being said: I'm glad I read both of these novels, particularly The Sound and the Fury, and Quentin, bless him, is a character I'd certainly light a candle for.
As I Lay Dying is a strange book for me to write about. Something in its essence seemed to hide just around the corners of the pages, just out of my grasp. I got the impression that had I been raised in the South the meaning that eluded me would have shined through. Something behind the attitude of the people towards each other, their sensibilities, the interactions between characters seemed to go over my head even as I struggled to comprehend what I could sense of its significance.
I got the distinct sense that this novel, whether intentionally or not, wasn't really written for me, but rather, as part of the 'our stories' canon. There is, naturally, no rule of authorship that every work of fiction should be aimed at the widest possible demographic, and having read it as an outsider I respect it, and respectfully didn't ~get it~.
That being said, the dry but nevertheless absurdist humor was not lost on me, and it's what I'll most fondly take away from this reading experience.
From 'my mother is a fish' to the mishaps on the 'if it can go wrong, it will go wrong' plot itself, to the little peculiarities of Anse with his stubborn determination to obey his wife's wishes to be buried in her hometown, Darl and his eventual pyromania, the big reveal from Addie herself. Some of the little flourishes within the characterizations were quite delightful.
However, though there may indeed be elements I cannot judge as good or bad, some of the technical aspects left a bit to be desired. The pacing of the front half of As I Lay Dying is painfully slow--I indeed felt as though by the time I got through it would be as I lay dying.
Regarding the writing itself: Faulkner is clearly a master of words, and capable of writing stunning passages, but because the conceit of this novel hinged on his ability to write each section in-character, some of that beautiful language took me out of the story. Suddenly I wasn't reading Darl's account of something happening, but rather, I was reading Faulkner describe something.
Overall, I'm glad I read this novel, and in fact I've turned around to read The Sound and the Fury to give Faulkner a fair blow since I did enjoy his writing, just not the way that it interrupted his storytelling.
The Sound and the Fury--3.5 starsMy initial reading experience of The Sound and the Fury was greatly colored by having just read As I Lay Dying.
Here, Faulkner seems to be exploring many of the same preoccupations: the decay of family/The South. Here, though, unlike As I Lay Dying, I felt like I ~got~ it. Perhaps it was the more direct interplay of the characters with people outside of their family/class/race, but something about this made much more sense out of As I Lay Dying.
This formerly very aristocratic family attempting and failing to reconcile the decline of The South, the way certain ideologies and attitudes don't seem able to survive in the 'new' South, the place of Black folks in the 'new' South. These things all really shine through in The Sound and the Fury. So too does the micro-level family drama centered around Caddy.
Plot-wise I thought this was a nice exploration of the American, Southern family at the time, and some of the scenes, particularly in Quentin's POV section, are stunningly beautiful pieces of writing that had me racing to find my quote notebook and a pen. Faulkner's little quips and insights through the mouthpiece of the family patriarch are also worth noting:
"It used to be a gentleman was known by his books; nowadays he is known by the ones he has not returned."
"Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life."
Jason's (and to some extent Quentin's too) section brings in more of the humor we got in As I Lay Dying, this time largely tied to his mad hunt for Miss Quentin:
"So when I looked around the door the first thing I saw was this red tie he had on and I was thinking what the hell kind of a man would wear a red tie."
"And there I was, without any hat, looking like I was crazy."
We also get this great follow-up scene wherein he goes blundering into the woods after her and sets his hand on some poison ivy. Without even bothering to remove his hand, he thinks to himself that at least it wasn't a snake.
I had a really great time reading those middle two sections, but alas, those they were book-ended by left much to be desired, and are what brings my overall rating of the book to 3.5
Given the experimental nature of a stream of consciousness novel, particularly at this time, it comes as no surprise that it's divisive. I fall on the end of the spectrum that didn't derive much pleasure from the opening section led by our POV character, Benji.
Getting through those first 100 pages felt like a challenge, rather than something I looked forward to. I had the benefit of this edition placing the Appendix at the beginning rather than the ending for which I'm incredibly grateful, however, reading through Benji's eyes was a slog. I can see why there are those that admire the ambition, but I felt it was just unbearably difficult to follow, even with the help of the appendix so that I at least knew going in there were two characters name Quentin from two different generations.
Upon reflection, something that made the journey not seem worth it was the writing itself, focused largely on relaying dialogue to help the reader puzzle-piece the narrative together. Ironically, the thing that made this section ultimately more frustrating was the for all that the structure of it was very true to stream of consciousness, it was utterly lacking in voice. I had no real sense of Benji's personality or motivations by the end of this. Strange, considering how fleshed out and real everyone else feels. The ending too, felt a bit lackluster and emotionless.
Everything else in The Sound and the Fury feels incredibly, meticulously intentional, so I've no doubt Faulkner put a lot of thought into the aforementioned two sections, they just didn't work for me.
That being said: I'm glad I read both of these novels, particularly The Sound and the Fury, and Quentin, bless him, is a character I'd certainly light a candle for.
April 16, 2022
The Sound and the Fury is the rarest of books that’s so much its own thing in form and intensity it feels like it exists on a different plane from all other novels. Over the course of four days and many lifetimes, the kaleidoscopic perspective-shifting puts the reader inside every fraying fiber during the dissolution of the Compson family. Read it once, read it 10 times, each and every page will take your guts and leave them spilled on the floor in fresh and more painful ways. A masterpiece in the most literal sense of the word: story, prose, and pushing the boundaries of what a novel could and should be.
August 10, 2022
Completed the first part of this book, The Sound and The Fury, through page 336. The first chapters are confusing and uncomfortable while the second half of the book reads more clearly and easily, providing material and storylines to better understand the earlier chapters. Perhaps this is a great book and maybe I'll return to it another time.
December 6, 2018
Dva vrhunska romana - BUKA I BIJES i KAD LEŽAH NA SAMRTI - prvi u mislima raste nakon čitanja; drugi je prava slastica baš tijekom čitanja.
December 6, 2024
A tough read, and well worth it. Made in the United States.
April 29, 2015
Propunându-și, parcă, să dărâme orice convenție literară, într-o epocă a inovațiilor pe toate planurile culturale, Faulkner descrie câteva zile din viața a trei frați pe fundalul decăderii și decadenței întregii lor familii. Împărțită în patru părți, primele trei redate prin prisma câte unuia dintre frați (interesant este aici faptul că sora lor Candance/Caddy este lăsată de-o parte, deși tot romanul se rotește în jurul ei) și doar ultima din punctul de vedere al unui narator omniscient, cartea include patru tehnici narative distincte.
Prima parte, a cărei acțiune se desfășoară (de fapt are ca prezent această zi, dar se desfășoară doar incidental în ea) în ziua de 7 aprilie 1928, este văzută (deși un termen mult mai potrivit ar fi aici simțită) prin ochii lui Benjy, născut Maury, care, deși nu ni se spune în mod clar de ce anume suferă, având la vârsta de 33 de ani mintea unui copil de trei ani, putem presupune că are o formă de retardare severă. Cu toate că vocabularul folosit de el este unul sărac, Benjy nu cunoaște proprietatea multora dintre termenii pe care îi folosește („iarba țârâie”, „camera a plecat”), utilizează expresii mai mult sau mai puțin criptice („au început formele”, „forme luminoase” (flăcări), „eu n-am tăcut” (a început să câncească ori să plângă)) și grație fluxului conștiinței cade pradă analepselor, lucru care face ca textul să fie pe alocuri ilizibil la o primă lectură. Deși povestea fragmentară și confuză spusă de el, înrădăcinată în prezentul zilei de 7 aprilie 1928, se întinde pe aproape trei decenii, există câteva momente de referință asupra cărora... http://liternautica.com/zgomotul-si-f...
Prima parte, a cărei acțiune se desfășoară (de fapt are ca prezent această zi, dar se desfășoară doar incidental în ea) în ziua de 7 aprilie 1928, este văzută (deși un termen mult mai potrivit ar fi aici simțită) prin ochii lui Benjy, născut Maury, care, deși nu ni se spune în mod clar de ce anume suferă, având la vârsta de 33 de ani mintea unui copil de trei ani, putem presupune că are o formă de retardare severă. Cu toate că vocabularul folosit de el este unul sărac, Benjy nu cunoaște proprietatea multora dintre termenii pe care îi folosește („iarba țârâie”, „camera a plecat”), utilizează expresii mai mult sau mai puțin criptice („au început formele”, „forme luminoase” (flăcări), „eu n-am tăcut” (a început să câncească ori să plângă)) și grație fluxului conștiinței cade pradă analepselor, lucru care face ca textul să fie pe alocuri ilizibil la o primă lectură. Deși povestea fragmentară și confuză spusă de el, înrădăcinată în prezentul zilei de 7 aprilie 1928, se întinde pe aproape trei decenii, există câteva momente de referință asupra cărora... http://liternautica.com/zgomotul-si-f...
May 9, 2015
All these years I've been kidding myself that I had actually read the whole book. I think I read only Benjy's section and maybe the Appendix, which comes at the opening. Even now, I know I didn't absorb it all. I am impressed but feeling like a slow learner. Perhaps one needs to read it three times in a row.
The story is about the crumbling of a Southern family and is told from different points of view in each section: an outside voice in the intro (Appendix) and the last section, Benjy (the mentally disabled brother), Quentin (the suicide), and Jason (the bitter and mean-spirited). But stronger presences are the sister Caddy (who leaves home when pregnant and is disowned) and Dilsey (the servant and representative of common sense and humanity).
I come away most aware of the normalcy of the servants (and discomfort at the language used about them) and the extreme cruelty of some Compson family members from pride, starting with the mother's miserable self-absorption. Dilsey is right that a curse will follow the mother's changing the name of her disabled child because she is mortified by him.
One thing I never took in from my college classes on this book was how much Caddy wanted to do right by her daughter and was blocked by Jason. I knew that although she was a wild spirit, she was wonderfully loving to Benjy, and I am glad to know this other aspect, too. Which makes it even sadder that Dilsey would not acknowledge her in a photo that turned up of Caddy and a Nazi. But Dilsey already knew the end had come.
That might be a spoiler, but this story is so opaque, no amount of spoiling will give you a clue.
The story is about the crumbling of a Southern family and is told from different points of view in each section: an outside voice in the intro (Appendix) and the last section, Benjy (the mentally disabled brother), Quentin (the suicide), and Jason (the bitter and mean-spirited). But stronger presences are the sister Caddy (who leaves home when pregnant and is disowned) and Dilsey (the servant and representative of common sense and humanity).
I come away most aware of the normalcy of the servants (and discomfort at the language used about them) and the extreme cruelty of some Compson family members from pride, starting with the mother's miserable self-absorption. Dilsey is right that a curse will follow the mother's changing the name of her disabled child because she is mortified by him.
One thing I never took in from my college classes on this book was how much Caddy wanted to do right by her daughter and was blocked by Jason. I knew that although she was a wild spirit, she was wonderfully loving to Benjy, and I am glad to know this other aspect, too. Which makes it even sadder that Dilsey would not acknowledge her in a photo that turned up of Caddy and a Nazi. But Dilsey already knew the end had come.
That might be a spoiler, but this story is so opaque, no amount of spoiling will give you a clue.
April 24, 2010
First read this in 97'. Shortly thereafter my prose went a little "modern." Highly influential (still like Light in August better.) This book is worth listening to (yes an audiobook.) The stream of consciousness is meant to be heard.
Want to read
December 4, 2008Never finished As I Lay Dying, but S & F was quite genius.
So I'm switching AILD to the to-read list upon enthusiastic encouragement from Jackie. (but when but when?)
So I'm switching AILD to the to-read list upon enthusiastic encouragement from Jackie. (but when but when?)
quit
May 29, 2010Made my head hurt after one page... Not my bag...
Read
June 25, 2011It has been so long since I have read these, and I read them for college courses at UWL I believe. I don't even remember if I liked or did not like them.
November 11, 2013
Low atmosphere.
Dark but deep.
Dark but deep.
September 29, 2025
I think Faulkner is exceptional! Not for everyone, however. This story is outstanding.
May 27, 2013
As I Lay Dying
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