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Title: The Sound and the Fury

Author: Faulkner, Willaim

Format: Paperback: 336 pages

Publisher: Vintage; Reissue edition (January 30, 1991)

ISBN: 0679732241

Review Date: June 23rd, 2007

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Rating:

Book Description: A book about the fall of the Compson family, an old Southern family with deep roots, written in a steam of conscious style by William Faulkner, one of the most celebrated of the Southern Renaissance writers.

Review:

Before any of my readers run out and get this book, let me solemnly warn you that Faulkner is an author that has no mercy on his readers.  He makes liberal usage of stream of conscious in this book, and to top it off, one of the characters is a mentally retarded man.

Before reading the book, I would also recommend that you read an essay by Walker Percy entitled Stoicism in the South.  This essay outlines some aspects of the culture that will be unfamiliar to most of Faulkner's readers.  (Percy, a Roman Catholic, was also a Southern writer).  Another book that I found myself cross referencing in my mind was C.S. Lewis' The Four Loves.

I believe the main theme of The Sound and the Fury ( here after SF) is that before a culture can decay, the family must decay.  For the family to decay, moral values, and above all love, must be perverted.

C.S. Lewis once wrote, "She is the type of woman who lives for others, and you can tell the others by the hunted looks on their faces."  Mrs. Compson is this type of woman.  She never showed any of he family love, instead letting Dilsey, the matriarch of the servant family, raise Mrs. Compson's children.  She is a hypochondriac and tries to evoke sympathy from the others by reminding them that they live in her house, but that she will be dead soon so they will not have to worry about taking care of her.  Mrs. Compson is an emotional leech, taking instead of supporting.  The exact opposite of her vocation as a mother.

Mr. Compson is a Southern stoic nihilist.  Instead of instilling values in his children, he teaches them that nothing matters and that Christ is simply a doll with saw dust leaking from his side.  His lectures about relativism and time are so strong, that they lead one of the children, Quentin, to commit suicide.

Quentin's sister, Candace, grows up to be promiscuous and brings a great deal of shame on the family.  Quentin tries to defend her honor by starting a fight with on of the men taking advantage of her, but he ends up falling to the ground quickly, after taking few sharp blows.  Because he does not understand what love is, he interprets his need to defend his sister as being incestuous.  He even tells his father they committed insect so he can take her away from all the men that would harm her.

Benjy, the mentally retarded character who's eyes we see through in the first chapter is a source of shame for the family.  He is castrated because his family thought he was trying to rape one of the school girls, (he was really looking for his sister Candace, who is the only family member who really loves him).  Strangely, Benjy is the character that has the most Christ-like themes applied to him.

Most of the story takes place over three days in 1928, Good Friday to Easter.  Most of the narrative conveys the hopelessness of humanity.  It is not until the fourth, and last, chapter from the perspective of Dilsey, that hope enters into the story.  Dilsey is a strong Christian character in the story, and the glue the holds the Compson family together, usually by sheer force of will and character.  She has the most intergraded understanding of time, and has come to terms with the fact that she is old and will die soon.  Or as she says, she has seen the beginning and the ending.

The book ends rather sadly, with Luster, one of the young black servants, taking Benjy to the graveyard in the families old and beat up carriage, pulled by a decrepit horse.

The book is very hard to read, but I think it is worth the trouble.  I found it was easier to read a chapter quickly with out try to understand every detail right way.  Then after letting it sit on the back burner for a while go back and read the chapter in more detail.  I confess that there are many layers to this book, and I have probably missed many of the finer details, so it might be a good idea to get some good critical commentaries after you have read it.