The Sound and the Fury (Norton Critical Editions) [Paperback]

So if you like a challenge (like extremely complex puzzles), you will love The Sound and The Fury. If you like your fiction more straightforward, you are going to wonder where you are at times. If you like new experiences in your reading, you will find the book very rewarding.

You will meet three generations of Compsons in this novel, along with their servants, friends, and coworkers. Each Compson is experiencing perceptual disconnections that make them ineffectively connected to reality. But each is different in their dysfunction. You will move inside the minds of three of them to experience those perceptions for yourself. It will not be pleasant. All of this occurs against the backdrop of a precipitous drop in economic and social status in a small community where status is very important.

If you are like me, you will find the beauty of this story in its structure, symbolism, and the character of Dilsey, the family's servant.

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.

I normally would not dwell on one symbol in a book as complex as this one, but I was very impressed by how well Faulkner boiled down his message into one tiny golf ball. I also mention this symbol here because it will also save you rereading the book at least once if you pay attention to that symbol the first time you read it, and realize that it is important. The roundness of the golf ball also gives you a hint of the book's structure at a time when that structure is totally opaque. You will be returning to variations on this symbol through several circles in the rest of the novel. I will not say any more about this ball's symbolism, because that could ruin the story for you.

Finally, Dilsey is as fine a human being as you can hope to meet in person or in any novel. She reminds me of a good family friend of ours, Cecile Antaya. Her heart is full of practical Christian charity and patience. Her support is critical to the family and to the story. A good question to ask yourself at the end is whether or not this book is really focused on Dilsey rather than on the Compsons.

The title also deserves mention. This book is far more aural than almost any other novel. Sounds reverbrate at key moments to provide critical meaning. The book often speaks without sounds, but there is much fury when the words are internal. Some of the sounds, especially Benjy's sounds, help cause the fury. You will enjoy the interplay of the story with the title.

Difficult books make us better readers. I hope you will find these challenges rewarding! After you have finished making The Sound and The Fury part of yourself, I suggest that you conduct a little experiment. Take a mealtime conversation that you participated in. Write down what you remember and what you thought was going on. Then ask each of the other people to do so as well without any checking with one another. When everyone is done, compare the results and discuss those results. I think what you will find is that you have created a minor version of the communication issues in this novel. I think you will understand much more about what Faulkner was saying about perception as a result.

Build understanding by being more forgiving!

I found the book rewarding. The troubles of Faulkner's central characters could have applied to people anywhere , which lends to the novel the universality of a true literary work. And his treatment of the black heroine Dilsey, who remained faithful both to her own beliefs and to her decadent white employers should conjure up real nostalgia for many natives of the Old South.

Faulkner's text of The Sound and the Fury occupies less than half the pages in the book. The remainder includes Backgrounds, Appendices, Cultural and Historical Contexts, and Criticism of both Faulkner and the novel. The novel as it was originally published in 1929, without benefit of these addendum, would no doubt have lost most readers because of the disjointed and incoherent technique Faulkner used in writing the first two of the four sections of the novel.

Faulkner's Appendix, published sixteen years after the original novel, and included in this edition, sheds a great deal of light on an otherwise dark text, and if read first would enable a reader to understand at least something the first time around. Faulkner himself noted that "I should have done this(the Appendix) when I wrote the book", and recommended that it appear first in the 1946 edition. I hope it did.

Without the explanatory addendum in this edition, I wouldn't have known what Faulkner was talking about most of the time. Thanks to editor David Minter for making Faulkner's work more understandable; but I disagree with Minter when he suggests that "...the place to begin is with the novel itself..."; I recommend beginning with Faulkner's Appendix. That way you may not have to read the novel two or three times to grasp some of its meaning.