The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner (1929)
“Four voices. Four narrators. One family destroying itself in real time — and Faulkner gives the first chapter to the one who cannot understand what he's telling you.”
Short Summary
The Compson family of Jefferson, Mississippi collapses over three days in April 1928, told through four radically different narrators: Benjy (intellectually disabled, no sense of time), Quentin (suicidal Harvard student in 1910), Jason (bitter, mercenary, the functional 'normal' brother), and Dilsey (the Black servant who holds what's left together). The novel's subject is the decay of the Old South through one aristocratic family — their loss of land, money, honor, and sanity — and the gap between how each mind constructs the same catastrophe.
Detailed Summary
The Sound and the Fury tells one story four times, each version more legible than the last, and each more devastating. The Compson family — once land-owning Mississippi aristocracy — is in terminal decline. The father, Jason Compson III, is an alcoholic philosopher. The mother, Caroline, is a hypoch...