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MASTER LIMBA Si COMUNICARE
The Sound and the Fury
By W. Faulkner
Stylistic analysis
Faulkner exhibits considerable flexibility in his writing style in the The Sound and the Fury. This is a psychological novel about the dissolution of a family with roots in the aristocratic Old South. It was published in New York on October 7, 1929, by Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith.
The narrator derived the title from words spoken by Macbeth, the murderous title character of Shakespeare's great play. After Macbeth's enemies, full of true anger, put him to silence, Macbeth expresses despair and utters resignation upon realizing that all his hopes and dreams have come to nothing as mere shadows of past promise. Macbeth's conclusion that life is nothing more than a tale told by an idiot sums up the Faulkner novel. Benjy, of course, is the idiot. Macbeth says:
"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
(Act V, Scene V, Lines 17-21)
The events in the novel occur according to relevance and significance, not time sequence. The novel consists of four chapters. The first is entitled "April Seventh, 1928'; the second, "June Second, 1910'; the third, "April Sixth, 1928'; and the fourth, "April Eighth, 1928." Male members of a declining southern family, the Compsons, narrate the first three chapters in first-person point of view, and the author presents the fourth chapter in omniscient, third-person point of view.
There are presented thought patterns and modes of expression of three different narrators: the first, an imbecile, the second, a sensitive college student, and the third, a redneck racist. He presents his own observations as the omniscient narrator of chapter four. He also writes a dialogue in the Southern black idiom.
The first chapter takes place on Saturday, April 7, 1928, the day before Easter, but flashes back frequently to previous years. The narrator of this chapter is Benjy Compson, who was born in 1895. He is slow-minded. He cannot speak, read, or write. His retardation is so severe that he even confuses the past with the present. A memory from long ago may occur to him as a present experience. For example, in response to a triggering sensation, a sound, a sight, or a smell, he might wait by the gate in front of his house for his sister to come home from school even though his sister long ago moved away from his house. In presenting Benjy's narration, Faulkner uses phrases that attempt to express the surreal and irrational workings of Benjy's mind. In one passage, Benjy says, "I could smell the clothes flapping." In others, Benjy hears the grass "rattling" or sees the wind "shining." One problem Benjy's narration poses, besides the confusing rat-a-tat of disjointed thoughts, is that it taxes plausibility and verisimilitude. A character incapable of speaking or writing cannot tell a story, unless, of course, the author invades the mind of this character and tells what he sees. Faulkner does so. Consequently, the first chapter is really a narrative oddity: the author speaks for the narrator.
The second chapter takes place on June 2, 1910. It also flashes back to previous years. The narrator is Quentin, the oldest Compson child, who was born in 1891. He is intelligent and articulate. However, because he is severely distraught, he frequently narrates in fitful, spasmodic bursts, jumping from one thought to another. Some paragraphs in this chapter contain no periods, commas, or capitalization.
The third chapter takes place on Good Friday, April 6, 1928. The narrator is Jason Lycurgus Compson IV, who was born in 1894. This chapter is straightforward and easy to understand. The last chapter takes place also in 1928 but on Easter Sunday, April 8. The narrator is the author and the narration is relatively easy to
The novel centers on the downfall of a family with roots in the aristocratic Old South. The family falls to ruin for a variety of reasons, but the main one appears to be the family's impaired or limited ability to express and share normal love. Mr. Compson's love of whiskey and nihilism command most of his attention, and Mrs. Compson's self-pity and inordinate concern for the family's 'good name' prevent her from being a loving, full-time mother. Caddy fulfills that role for Benjy, and Dilsey does what she can for him and the other Compson children while raising a family of her own. In her own search for love, Caddy turns to promiscuity. In his search for love, Quentin becomes fixated on Caddy with platonic incestual desire. Jason loves no one but himself and money. Caddy's daughter, Miss Quentin, recreates her mother's promiscuity. Unlike Caddy, though, she has no time for Benjy. Uncle Maury seeks love with another man's wife.
Another important issue in the novel is that time is in chaos. Benjy has little or no sense of the passage of time. Even after Caddy has moved out of the Compson household, he waits for her at the front gate to come home from school. His mind lives in the past and the present as if they were one. Quentin, captivated by the culture and values of the Old South Compsons, cannot adjust to the present. His father, on the other hand, exists in a kind of chronological midpoint. He tells Quentin that 'clocks slay time.' He also says that 'time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.' Faulkner appears to be making a sort of Einsteinian statement: that time is not fixed.
Rebellion also plays an important role in creating the story. Caddy rebels against Old South Compson propriety when she becomes intimate with her male friends. Her brother Quentin rebels against time, twisting off the hands of his wristwatch. Jason, filled with a state of discontent, rebels against Caddy, Quentin, Benjy, and his parents, regarding himself as the only worthwhile member of the family. He also rejects women as 'bitches' and becomes a racist and anti-Semite. Mr. and Mrs. Compson rebel against parenthood.
The idea of death is found in many metaphorical structures in the text. The Compson family, a remainder of the Old South aristocratic way of life, is in its death throes. Its money is declining, its ancestral home is decaying, and its land holdings are shrinking. Prospects for a new generation of aristocratic Compsons are virtually nonexistent. Benjy cannot marry, Jason refuses to marry, and Quentin commits suicide. Caddy marries, but her husband divorces her after discovering that another man, presumably Dalton Ames, fathered the child she bears. This child, Miss Quentin, rejects the family and runs off with a man from a traveling show.
There are a lot of circumstances in which the characters blame one another. Compson blames Benjy, Caddy, and others for the travails she faces. Jason blames everyone, including his siblings, his parents, Miss Quentin, and Dilsey, for his problems or failures. When in his car chasing Miss Quentin and the man with the red tie, he even blames the government for not fixing the roads, saying 'Yet we spend money and spend money on roads and dam if it isn't like trying to drive over a sheet of corrugated iron roofing. I'd like to know how a man could be expected to keep up with even a wheelbarrow.' Quentin blames himself for not protecting Caddy.
In The Sound and the Fury, the past frequently intrudes upon the present in the minds of three central characters who each narrate part of the novel. This intrusion is not unusual; it happens to every man and woman from time to time. For example, when someone listens to a sermon in a church or a lecture in a classroom, or when someone is jogging or making a bed, a memory from yesterday, a year ago, or 20 years ago may suddenly seize your attention. A sound, a sight, a taste, or a smell may have triggered that memory. Or the memory may simply have sprung up, unbidden. In most of this Faulkner novel, the past frequently intrudes upon the here and now, barging into a character's present thoughts without warning.
Often, the memories occur without heed to chronological sequence. A memory from 1910 might walk into the first paragraph on a page and a memory from 1898 into the third paragraph, with present thoughts occupying the second paragraph. But even when the present is in control, it may veer from one present thought to an unrelated present thought. Consequently, the events in the novel become like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle cast off on a table. However, as the novel progresses, information slowly emerges that enables the reader to match one piece with another until a picture forms, an impressionistic rendering of the decline and fall of a southern family whose roots extend back many generations. It is not easy, though, to assemble the puzzle.
Striking imagery characterizes the narration. Here are some examples:
- simile ("Then I saw Caddy, with flowers in her hair, and a long veil like shining wind.", ("I quit moving around and went to the window and drew the curtains aside and watched them running for chapel, the same ones fighting the same heaving coat-sleeves, the same books and flapping collars flushing past like debris on a flood."
- metaphor The grass was buzzing in the moonlight where my shadow walked on the grass.", here Benjy turns the grass into chirping crickets; the shadow becomes the Shakespearean symbol of wasted life);
metaphor and simile I could hear the Great American Gelding [Benjy] snoring away like a planing mill. He was like a worn small rock whelmed by the successive waves of his voice.", here the metaphor refers to the rise and fall of the minister's voice resembling the sound of ocean waves
simile and alliteration ("A pair of jaybirds came up from nowhere, whirled up on the blast like gaudy scraps of cloth or paper and lodged in the mulberries, where they swung in raucous tilt and recover.", omniscient narrator)
Faulkner sometimes uses the stream-of-consciousness technique in the first three chapters. Stream of consciousness was a technique where the writer tried to present the story in the way that the narrator's experiences, including the random sensations, memories, and emotions they have during a particular event, are presented in the illogical jumble that the character would have experienced them. For example, the baseball game that the narrator is watching is interrupted by a memory that it triggers and perhaps the sensation of being cold. Then the car down the street backfires, triggering a new set of sensations and memories that disrupt the flow of the baseball game. The result is that the reader may not be able to follow the activity of the events clearly because they are interrupted in their understanding.
Also in the second chapter the stream-of-consciousness can easily be identified (it presents the thoughts of Quentin as he recalls bits and pieces of statements made by his mother): :"what have I done to have been given children like these Benjamin was punishment enough and now for her to have no more regard for me her own mother I've suffered for her dreamed and planned and sacrificed I went down into the valley yet never since she opened her eyes has she given me one unselfish thought at times I look at her I wonder if she can be my child except Jason he has never given me one moment's sorrow since I first held him in my arms..."
All in all, William Faulkner's fourth novel, The Sound and the Fury is a haunting and sometimes bewildering novel that surprises and absorbs the reader each time it is read. The novel was Faulkner's personal favorite and, along with James Joyce's novel Ulysses and T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land, is generally thought to be one of the greatest works of literature in English of the twentieth century.
