The Sound and the Fury By William Faulkner

Styles and technique Stream of consciousness is a technique used by writer’s who want to mimic the way we really experience life. Life is a blend of sensation, memory, emotion and thought all rolled into an indivisible experience. Writer’s use stream of consciousness to convey that reality to the reader.

Faulkner wrote the first three sections of The Sound and the Fury using stream of consciousness.

Faulkner wrote at a time when high modernism was popular. High modernists felt that the traditional method of presenting space and time in the arts didn’t mesh with how we experience life. In the novel, Faulkner tries to present time in a variety of fashions. With Benjy he presents all of time as being a single moment. With Quentin he presents us with someone trapped in the past, unwilling to accept the present and who ultimately refuses the future by committing suicide.

Jason represents the traditional linear view of time. Dilsey holds both the beginning and the end in her hands and by the end of the novel she realizes it when she says “I seed the beginnin, en now I sees de endin.”

Before commenting on the content and value of the book, let me warn that this is one of the most difficult to understand and appreciate of all American novels. Several factors combine to create that difficulty. First, one of the narrators is a person with mental deficiencies. Second, the first section uses an unusual flashback technique that cannot be understood very clearly until you have read the whole book (perhaps more than once). Third, Faulkner is sparing in his clues of how the stories weave together.

Fourth, the sensibilities of the day meant that much is implied rather than stated overtly. looking directly at the center. But you have to understand what those hints are about,.or you miss the story. there is much dense Southern black dialect here that requires slow reading to capture the sense of. Fifth, the interior dialogues are interspaced with external dialogues which can create confusion. Sixth, there is a lot of crude stream of consciousness material here, but it will not enchant you as Joyce's or Proust's will.

Seventh, the book is heavy with unusual symbolism that is easy to miss. Eighth, the center of the story is often drawn in by looking at the edges rather than looking directly at the center.

The structure allows the reader to discern the book's reality from a subjective perspective, like good art does. There's lots of raw material for judgment here, and your opinions will slowly build. There are obvious connections among the characters and the story, but these connections leave you with basic questions about what causes what. Those questions of causation are one of the strengths of the novel. Because you can start with any circumstance and move off to look for connections, and you will rejoin yourself at the same circumstance eventually

Even in our disconnectedness, we are powerfully connected is the message. I think of this book as a five dimensional puzzle: with time, space, self-interest, subjective perception, and family being the five dimensions. Pulling it all into a coherent image is a worthy task that should delight your mind.

None of Faulkner’s novels has generated as much critical response as The Sound and the Fury. Because of the sheer abundance of published criticism on the novel, not to mention the vastly divergent opinions and interpretations of the novel, any effort here at commentary on the novel must necessarily fall short. Still, there are some things on which critics agree. Few dispute that the novel depicts a “tragedy,” the decline of the Compson family. There is agreement too that much of the novel is told in a stream-of-consciousness style, in which a character’s unadorned thoughts are conveyed in a manner roughly equivalent to the way our minds actually work. Themes critics continuously note in the novel are order, honor, sin.

And nearly all critics consider it a technical masterpiece for the way Faulkner incorporates four distinct narrative modes in telling the story of a little girl with muddy drawers.

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