Mark André ’s Reviews > The Sound and the Fury > Status Update

It’s a curious thing how no matter what’s wrong with you, a man’ll
tell you to have your teeth examined and a woman’ll tell you to get
married.

Prohibition’s a fine thing. Used to be they’d come in Saturday with just
one pair of shoes in the family and him wearing them, and they’d go down
to the express office and get his package; now they all go to the show
barefooted, with the merchants in the door like a row of tigers or
something in a cage, watching them pass.

Let it wash a man’s crop out of the ground year after year, and them up there in Washington spending fifty thousand dollars a day keeping an army in Nicaragua or some place.

So when I looked around the door the first thing I saw was the red tie he had on and I was thinking what the hell kind of a man would wear a red tie.

. . . but every time I took that letter out something would come up. They were all in town for the show, coming in in droves to give their money to
something that brought nothing to the town and wouldn’t leave anything
except what those grafters in the Mayor’s office will split among themselves,

. . . lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of grey halflight where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.

i think you are too serious to give me any cause for alarm you wouldn’t have felt driven to the expedient of telling me you have committed incest otherwise and i i wasnt lying i wasnt lying and he you wanted to sublimate a piece of natural human folly into a horror and then exorcise it with truth and i it was to isolate her out of the loud world so that it would have to
flee us of necessity and then the sound of it

. . . lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of grey halflight where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.

Well, bud,” he said, looking at me, “I’ll be damned if you dont go to a
lot of trouble to have your fun. Kidnapping, then fighting. What do you
do on your holidays? burn houses? I

The bird whistled again, invisible, a sound meaningless and profound,
inflexionless, ceasing as though cut off with the blow of a knife, and
again, and that sense of water swift and peaceful above secret places,
felt, not seen not heard.