Attempt a critical analysis of The Sound and the Fury.

The Sound and the Fury, novel by William Faulkner, published in 1929, that details the destruction and downfall of the aristocratic Compson family from four different points of view. Faulkner’s fourth novel, The Sound and the Fury is notable for its nonlinear plot structure and its unconventional narrative style. Attempt a critical analysis of The Sound and the Fury.

The Sound and the Fury is divided into four sections. Attempt a critical analysis of The Sound and the Fury. The first three are presented from the perspectives of the three Compson sons: Benjamin (“Benjy,” born Maury), the “idiot”; Quentin, the suicidal student; and Jason, the failed businessman. The fourth section has a third-person omniscient narrator. All but the second section are set in fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, in April 1928.

The four sections, despite their formal differences, overlap in important ways. In essence, they tell the same story—that of the elusive Compson daughter, Candace (“Caddy”), who was divorced by her husband and disowned by her family after it was revealed that her child, Quentin (“Miss Quentin,” named for her uncle), had been conceived out of wedlock. When the disgraced Caddy left the Compson household in 1911, she did not take her daughter. Miss Quentin remained with the family to be raised as a Compson. Although her presence is pervasive throughout, Caddy does not actually appear in the novel. She is reconstructed through the memories of her three brothers, each of whom remembers and relates to her in a different way.

The Sound and the Fury was Faulkner's own favourite amongst his novels. -1 have the most tenderness for that book,' he told an audience of students at the University of Nagano. Earlier, in a prefacc to the Modern Literary edition of Sanchtrarjl (1932), he spoke of 'having written my guts into 'The Sound and the Fury'. Modem Criticism has concurred with this preference. Today The Sound and the Fury is widely acknowledged to be Faulkner's finest achievement - and hence one of the finest achievements of modern American Literature. Yet at the time of the Novel's publication in 1929 its critical reception was discouraging; as he confessed in the Sanctuary preface, Faulkner 'believed then that I would never be published again. I had stopped thinking of myself in publishing terms.' Attempt a critical analysis of The Sound and the Fury.The most frequent voiced objection was the baffling obscurity of Faulkner's narrative technique. Indeed, when the novel was published as part of Macolm Cowley's The Portable Falclkner in 1946, the editor and publisher persuaded Faulkner to add an Appendix elucidating much of the plot. The author had, after all, a simple enough story to tell. He wanted to recount the traumatic and unhappy lines of the four Compson Children - Caddy, Quentin, Jason and Benjy - and suggest the ways in which their separate tragedies echoed the general decline of the old Southern aristocratic families.

Faulkner took his title for the novel from Macbeth's nihilistic speech about life's futility; and the fate of the Compson family would seem to fulfill this pessimistic note yet the decision to add a fourth section to the novel, concentrating on the black servant Dilbey, introduces a lot of qualified optimism. Alone amongst the characters in the novel Dilbey retains an ability, not to enjoy life or even to ask much from it, but to survive and help others to survive. As she goes about her depressing round of chores - gathering firewood, cooking breakfast, comforting the querulous Mrs. Compson and the tearful Benjy - Dilsey radiates an atmosphere of warmth and stability.

Attempt a critical analysis of The Sound and the Fury. In the final sentence of his 1946 Appendix Faulkner paid a cryptic but moving tribute to Dilsey and her fellow blacks: 'they endured'. In his Nobel Prize speech Faulkner returned, though in more confided and assertive vein, to this notion of endurance. He believed, he said, 'that man will not merely endure. He will prevail.. . because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. '

The Sound and the Fury documents the decline of these families. The Compsons, as Faulkner casts them, are direct descendants of the planter-aristocrats. They are the inheritors of their values and traditions, on whom the survival (or ultimate extinction) of this Southern aristocracy depends. The Compsons, for the most part, shirk this responsibility. Quentin, however, does not. The burden of the past falls heavily upon Quentin, who, as the eldest son, feels he must preserve and protect the Compson family honour. Quentin identifies his sister as the principal bearer of the honour he is to protect. When he fails to protect that honour—that is, when Caddy loses her virginity to Dalton Ames and becomes pregnant—Quentin elects to commit suicide.

Attempt a critical analysis of The Sound and the Fury. Quentin’s suicide, in conjunction with Caddy’s pregnancy, precipitates the fall of the Compson family. Still, for nearly two decades, the family survives. Its death knell is tolled on April 8, 1928, by Miss Quentin, who “swung herself by a rainpipe” to the locked window of her uncle’s bedroom, took her mother’s money, “climbed down the same rainpipe in the dusk,” and vanished, taking with her not only the money but the last semblance of the Compson family honour. At the end of the novel, the Compson family is in ruins and, on a larger scale, the Southern aristocracy is too. The Sound and the Fury’s form is distinctly Modernist: Faulkner employs a number of narrative techniques, including unreliable narrators, interior monologues, and unconventional syntax, that are recurrent features of literary Modernism.

Attempt a critical analysis of The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner’s conception of time, particularly as expressed in his nonlinear representation of time, is a cause of disagreement among scholars, who argue over which different philosophies influenced Faulkner and to what extent. A number of scholars, for example, have made the case for a link between Faulkner’s conception of time and the theory of duration formulated by French philosopher Henri Bergson. Such an argument places Faulkner among a number of Modernist writers influenced by Bergson, including Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot. Attempt a critical analysis of The Sound and the Fury. The title of Faulkner’s novel alone expresses Faulkner’s concern with time. The Sound and the Fury takes its name from a soliloquy given by the title character of William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth.

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