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The Sound and the Fury: The Corrected Text Paperback – October 1, 1990
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One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner’s masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.
“I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire.... I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.” —from The Sound and the Fury
- Print length326 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateOctober 1, 1990
- Dimensions5.2 x 0.72 x 7.97 inches
- ISBN-100679732241
- ISBN-13978-0679732242
- Lexile measure800L
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From #1 New York Times bestselling author Colleen Hoover comes a novel that explores life after tragedy and the enduring spirit of love. | Learn more
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Get to know this book
What's it about?
A family of Southern aristocrats faces personal and financial ruin, with memorable characters like Caddy, Benjy, Quentin, Jason, and Dilsey. Their lives are fragmented and haunted by history and legacy, creating a tragic masterpiece.Popular highlight
Father said a man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you’d think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune Father said.686 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
It’s not when you realise that nothing can help you—religion, pride, anything—it’s when you realise that you dont need any aid.663 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
It’s always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret. Father said that. That Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels. That had no sister.525 Kindle readers highlighted this
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
If Benjy's section is the most daringly experimental, Jason's is the most harrowing. "Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say," he begins, lacing into Caddy's illegitimate daughter, and then proceeds to hurl mud at blacks, Jews, his sacred Compson ancestors, his glamorous, promiscuous sister, his doomed brother Quentin, his ailing mother, and the long-suffering black servant Dilsey who holds the family together by sheer force of character.
Notoriously "difficult," The Sound and the Fury is actually one of Faulkner's more accessible works once you get past the abrupt, unannounced time shifts--and certainly the most powerful emotionally. Everything is here: the complex equilibrium of pre-civil rights race relations; the conflict between Yankee capitalism and Southern agrarian values; a meditation on time, consciousness, and Western philosophy. And all of it is rendered in prose so gorgeous it can take your breath away. Here, for instance, Quentin recalls an autumnal encounter back home with the old black possum hunter Uncle Louis: And we'd sit in the dry leaves that whispered a little with the slow respiration of our waiting and with the slow breathing of the earth and the windless October, the rank smell of the lantern fouling the brittle air, listening to the dogs and to the echo of Louis' voice dying away. He never raised it, yet on a still night we have heard it from our front porch. When he called the dogs in he sounded just like the horn he carried slung on his shoulder and never used, but clearer, mellower, as though his voice were a part of darkness and silence, coiling out of it, coiling into it again. WhoOoooo. WhoOoooo. WhoOooooooooooooooo. What Faulkner has created is a modernist epic in which characters assume the stature of gods and the primal family events resonate like myths. It is The Sound and the Fury that secures his place in what Edmund Wilson called "the full-dressed post-Flaubert group of Conrad, Joyce, and Proust." --David Laskin
Review
“No man ever put more of his heart and soul into the written word than did William Faulkner. If you want to know all you can about that heart and soul, the fiction where he put it is still right there.” —Eudora Welty
From the Inside Flap
From the Back Cover
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.
"Here, caddie." He hit. They went away across the pasture. I held to the fence and watched them going away.
"Listen at you, now." Luster said. "Aint you something, thirty three years old, going on that way. After I done went all the way to town to buy you that cake. Hush up that moaning. Aint you going to help me find that quarter so I can go to the show tonight."
They were hitting little, across the pasture. I went back along the fence to where the flag was. It flapped on the bright grass and the trees.
"Come on." Luster said. "We done looked there. They aint no more coming right now. Les go down to the branch and find that quarter before them niggers finds it."
It was red, flapping on the pasture. Then there was a bird slanting and tilting on it. Luster threw. The flag flapped on the bright grass and the trees. I held to the fence.
"Shut up that moaning." Luster said. "I cant make them come if they aint coming, can I. If you dont hush up, mammy aint going to have no birthday for you. If you dont hush, you know what I going to do. I going to eat that cake all up. Eat them candles, too. Eat all them thirty three candles. Come on, les go down to the branch. I got to find my quarter. Maybe we can find one of they balls. Here. Here they is. Way over yonder. See." He came to the fence and pointed his arm. "See them. They aint coming back here no more. Come on."
We went along the fence and came to the garden fence, where our shadows were. My shadow was higher than Luster's on the fence. We came to the broken place and went through it.
"Wait a minute." Luster said. "You snagged on that nail again. Cant you never crawl through here without snagging on that nail."
Caddy uncaught me and we crawled through. Uncle Maury said to not let anybody see us, so we better stoop over, Caddy said. Stoop over, Benjy. Like this, see. We stooped over and crossed the garden, where the flowers rasped and rattled against us. The ground was hard. We climbed the fence, where the pigs were grunting and snuffing. I expect they're sorry because one of them got killed today, Caddy said. The ground was hard, churned and knotted.
Keep your hands in your pockets, Caddy said. Or they'll get froze. You dont want your hands froze on Christmas, do you.
"It's too cold out there." Versh said. "You dont want to go out doors."
"What is it now." Mother said.
"He want to go out doors." Versh said.
"Let him go." Uncle Maury said.
"It's too cold." Mother said. "He'd better stay in. Benjamin. Stop that, now."
"It wont hurt him." Uncle Maury said.
"You, Benjamin." Mother said. "If you dont be good, you'll have to go to the kitchen."
"Mammy say keep him out the kitchen today." Versh said. "She say she got all that cooking to get done."
"Let him go, Caroline." Uncle Maury said. "You'll worry yourself sick over him."
"I know it." Mother said. "It's a judgment on me. I sometimes wonder."
"I know, I know." Uncle Maury said. "You must keep your strength up. I'll make you a toddy."
"It just upsets me that much more." Mother said. "Dont you know it does."
"You'll feel better." Uncle Maury said. "Wrap him up good, boy, and take him out for a while."
Uncle Maury went away. Versh went away.
"Please hush." Mother said. "We're trying to get you out as fast as we can. I dont want you to get sick."
Versh put my overshoes and overcoat on and we took my cap and went out. Uncle Maury was putting the bottle away in the sideboard in the diningroom.
"Keep him out about half an hour, boy." Uncle Maury said. "Keep him in the yard, now."
"Yes, sir." Versh said. "We dont never let him get off the place."
We went out doors. The sun was cold and bright.
"Where you heading for." Versh said. "You dont think you going to town, does you." We went through the rattling leaves. The gate was cold. "You better keep them hands in your pockets." Versh said. "You get them froze onto that gate, then what you do. Whyn't you wait for them in the house." He put my hands into my pockets. I could hear him rattling in the leaves. I could smell the cold. The gate was cold.
"Here some hickeynuts. Whooey. Git up that tree. Look here at this squirl, Benjy."
I couldn't feel the gate at all, but I could smell the bright cold.
"You better put them hands back in your pockets."
Caddy was walking. Then she was running, her book-satchel swinging and jouncing behind her.
"Hello, Benjy." Caddy said. She opened the gate and came in and stooped down. Caddy smelled like leaves. "Did you come to meet me." she said. "Did you come to meet Caddy. What did you let him get his hands so cold for, Versh."
"I told him to keep them in his pockets." Versh said. "Holding on to that ahun gate."
"Did you come to meet Caddy," she said, rubbing my hands. "What is it. What are you trying to tell Caddy." Caddy smelled like trees and like when she says we were asleep.
What are you moaning about, Luster said. You can watch them again when we get to the branch. Here. Here's you a jimson weed. He gave me the flower. We went through the fence, into the lot.
"What is it." Caddy said. "What are you trying to tell Caddy. Did they send him out, Versh."
"Couldn't keep him in." Versh said. "He kept on until they let him go and he come right straight down here, looking through the gate."
"What is it." Caddy said. "Did you think it would be Christmas when I came home from school. Is that what you thought. Christmas is the day after tomorrow. Santy Claus, Benjy. Santy Claus. Come on, let's run to the house and get warm." She took my hand and we ran through the bright rustling leaves. We ran up the steps and out of the bright cold, into the dark cold. Uncle Maury was putting the bottle back in the sideboard. He called Caddy. Caddy said,
"Take him in to the fire, Versh. Go with Versh." she said. "I'll come in a minute."
We went to the fire. Mother said,
"Is he cold, Versh."
"Nome." Versh said.
"Take his overcoat and overshoes off." Mother said. "How many times do I have to tell you not to bring him into the house with his overshoes on."
"Yessum." Versh said. "Hold still, now." He took my overshoes off and unbuttoned my coat. Caddy said,
"Wait, Versh. Cant he go out again, Mother. I want him to go with me."
"You'd better leave him here." Uncle Maury said. "He's been out enough today."
"I think you'd both better stay in." Mother said. "It's getting colder, Dilsey says."
"Oh, Mother." Caddy said.
"Nonsense." Uncle Maury said. "She's been in school all day. She needs the fresh air. Run along, Candace."
"Let him go, Mother." Caddy said. "Please. You know he'll cry."
"Then why did you mention it before him." Mother said. "Why did you come in here. To give him some excuse to worry me again. You've been out enough today. I think you'd better sit down here and play with him."
"Let them go, Caroline." Uncle Maury said. "A little cold wont hurt them. Remember, you've got to keep your strength up."
"I know." Mother said. "Nobody knows how I dread Christmas. Nobody knows. I am not one of those women who can stand things. I wish for Jason's and the children's sakes I was stronger."
"You must do the best you can and not let them worry you." Uncle Maury said. "Run along, you two. But dont stay out long, now. Your mother will worry."
"Yes, sir." Caddy said. "Come on, Benjy. We're going out doors again." She buttoned my coat and we went toward the door.
"Are you going to take that baby out without his overshoes." Mother said. "Do you want to make him sick, with the house full of company."
"I forgot." Caddy said. "I thought he had them on."
We went back. "You must think." Mother said. Hold still now Versh said. He put my overshoes on. "Someday I'll be gone, and you'll have to think for him." Now stomp Versh said. "Come here and kiss Mother, Benjamin."
Caddy took me to Mother's chair and Mother took my face in her hands and then she held me against her.
"My poor baby." she said. She let me go. "You and Versh take good care of him, honey."
"Yessum." Caddy said. We went out. Caddy said,
"You needn't go, Versh. I'll keep him for a while."
"All right." Versh said. "I aint going out in that cold for no fun." He went on and we stopped in the hall and Caddy knelt and put her arms around me and her cold bright face against mine. She smelled like trees.
"You're not a poor baby. Are you. Are you. You've got your Caddy. Haven't you got your Caddy."
Cant you shut up that moaning and slobbering, Luster said. Aint you shamed of yourself, making all this racket. We passed the carriage house, where the carriage was. It had a new wheel.
"Git in, now, and set still until your maw come." Dilsey said. She shoved me into the carriage. T. P. held the reins. "Clare I dont see how come Jason wont get a new surrey." Dilsey said. "This thing going to fall to pieces under you all some day. Look at them wheels."
Mother came out, pulling her veil down. She had some flowers.
"Where's Roskus." she said.
"Roskus cant lift his arms, today." Dilsey said. "T. P. can drive all right."
Product details
- Publisher : Vintage; First Edition (October 1, 1990)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 326 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0679732241
- ISBN-13 : 978-0679732242
- Lexile measure : 800L
- Item Weight : 8.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.2 x 0.72 x 7.97 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #11,833 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #527 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #813 in Women's Domestic Life Fiction
- #1,570 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors
Born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, William Faulkner was the son of a family proud of their prominent role in the history of the south. He grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, and left high school at fifteen to work in his grandfather's bank.
Rejected by the US military in 1915, he joined the Canadian flyers with the RAF, but was still in training when the war ended. Returning home, he studied at the University of Mississippi and visited Europe briefly in 1925.
His first poem was published in The New Republic in 1919. His first book of verse and early novels followed, but his major work began with the publication of The Sound and the Fury in 1929. As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and The Wild Palms (1939) are the key works of his great creative period leading up to Intruder in the Dust (1948). During the 1930s, he worked in Hollywood on film scripts, notably The Blue Lamp, co-written with Raymond Chandler.
William Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 and the Pulitzer Prize for The Reivers just before his death in July 1962.
Photo by Carl Van Vechten [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
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Customers disagree about the readability. Some find the book well-written and mentally challenging, while others say it's not an easy read and confusing. They also disagree on the emotional tone, with some finding it deep and fascinating, while other find it depressing and hard to follow at times.
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Customers are mixed about the readability. Some find the book well written, easy to read, and mentally challenging. Others say it's difficult to read and follow, tiresome to struggle through, convoluted, disjunctive, and impossible to work out from page 1 to the end.
"...I had absolutely no clue what the heck was going on, the sentences were disjunctive, the thoughts scrambled, the characters were dropping in then..." Read more
"This is among the greatest, most mentally challenging, emotionally arresting novel I have ever read...." Read more
"...excellent book, just prepare yourself before hand on the writing style which is very unique." Read more
"...Perhaps this is the way the mind works, but it is tiresome to struggle through...." Read more
Customers are mixed about the emotional tone. Some find the story fascinating, with wonderful evocation of human emotions. They appreciate the linear narration and simple way to understand that chapter. However, others find the book hard to follow at times and depressing, with the effect of mental incoherence. They also say the subject matter is dark and not for the faint of heart.
"...Gratefully, there was enough linear narration that I grasped what was going on, and when reading it I employed an old high school trick: when I..." Read more
"...what the heck was going on, the sentences were disjunctive, the thoughts scrambled, the characters were dropping in then disappearing, it seemed to..." Read more
"...members of the Compson family—the good and faithful servant, compassionate, not sentimental, a woman who preserves her dignity despite the vicious..." Read more
"...Benjy's narrative is difficult to be sure, but when the book is said and done, his is arugably the most memorable..." Read more
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I never thought I could read it; I tried 30 years ago, 19 years ago, 10 years after that, before I finally finished it a couple of years ago. When I picked it up, I concluded quickly that Faulkner must be a sadist to write anything like the first 10 pages. I read it twice and I was no better off the second time as I was the first go-round. I had absolutely no clue what the heck was going on, the sentences were disjunctive, the thoughts scrambled, the characters were dropping in then disappearing, it seemed to change time frames without any recognizable order so I had no sense of time and, ultimately, I had forgotten why it was, exactly, that I had bought the damned thing in the first place!
Oh yeah, I told myself. You want to read Mr. Mint Juleps from that Rowan Oak plantation home up in Oxford. You believe that by doing that you are proving maybe once and for all time that you too can escape the past of this State in which you were raised and of these ghosts that you find despicable, this hate you had no part of, these white sheets, fulgent from the flames above them but burned by the evil beneath, these ignorant men who were passed down hatred as heirlooms to hand down to their sons and their daughters. You think if you can make it through this man's novels it will show that you are more intelligent than what people from afar believe you to be, that you are not like the rednecks you see every day but burst from within to bound over, that you are not like your mother's father who you worshiped, a business man and deacon in the town's largest Southern Baptist church, who you remember using the N word once as you sat beside him at 7 as he was driving from downtown Natchez (the home of my forefathers), a town on the mighty Mississippi River filled with beautiful antebellum plantation homes and scattered with remnants of slavery and a segregated past before you were born, the town in which your mother is now buried 10 feet from her father. And your mother, God bless her, along with your father, raised you not to hate, nor to judge, and for that you believe you have been blessed.
After she was buried, you finally got the gumption to make it all the way through this knotty novel by that iconic author from the northern corner of your home state of Mississippi. It took a paperback, an electronic companion guide and an audible version to make it through and understand that you needed to read this book, that it was crucial as one more molting of the skin of your past, one more step away from the sins of the fathers, one further step away from that past for my children and hopefully their children.
I did it.
This book haunts you. Here's the thing. You know that feeling you get when you hear a song or see a face that sparks some vague memory? The memory may have been a dream, or may have been something you saw in a movie. It might well have been something that never actually happened to you, but was some fantasy you had years ago. Maybe there's even a physical reaction? There is a connection, but you can't quite put your finger on it. Still, it occupies your mind for an afternoon and inspires a train of thought you might not have had otherwise. That's good right? Of course. That's what you get with this book. you're trying to find that connection.
The more important themes here have less to do with the post-reconstruction era/turn of the century south, and more to do with a broader examination of time and history as it relates to the human/family experience. This is a book that unfolds like nothing I've ever read. You're sort of lost for the first 70-100 pages. Our understanding of time as a linear process will confound your experience with the first section of the book. Benjy's narrative is difficult to be sure, but when the book is said and done, his is arugably the most memorable (though Quentin's honestly rivals it as a literary tour de force). In all, the book is divided into four sections with four different viewpoints. We see through Benjy the past, present, and future existing on a plane rather than a line; Quentin's inability to accept time's passing at all and his longing for the past (a past he was not necessarily a part of); Jason living only in the present and obsessing over an up to the minute existence; and finally Dilsey who seems the only member of the household with the ability to absorb the past as a part of the here and now, and lives without fear the future. This theme is explored through style. It's like reading a dream. The idea is to pull together all these moments, images, and broken bits of dialogue in order to get to the heart of that feeling I was talking about earlier. "where did this come from? why am I thinking about this? When will I be able to pull it together and figure it out?"
And in fact, time's presence becomes so prevalent, that by the end of the book it practically becomes another character: "On the wall above a cupboard, invisible save at night, by lamplight and even then evincing an enigmatic profundity because it had but one hand, a cabinet clock ticked, then with a preliminary sound as if it had cleared its throat, struck five times" (341).
So why this theme of time in The Sound and the Fury? Is it that the miseries of its people are so held hostage by it? The book is basically 425 pages of nightmare imagery and suffering with no sign of hope. Would it not be human nature to wonder when it would end? Was Faulkner trying to create an emotional reflection of this tragic Mississippi household through the mind's eye of the reader? I am convinced this to be true. Why else would he devote the first 90 pages to a mentally retarded narrator (Benjamin) who can't even feed himself? Why else would he commit the next 80 pages or so to a reasonably intelligent but obviously insane narrator who is about to kill himself (Quentin). And why would he devote a third section, to the "sanest" member of the family (Jason) and make him almost as incomprehensible as the previous two?
Thankfully, we have the final section and an opportunity to see the household through the frankness and honesty of a black servant woman's eyes (Dilsey). Though ironically, Faulkner does not grant her narrator status. Rather, as mentioned earlier, Dilsey's voice is heard through an omniscient narrator. The reasoning behind this is the stuff of research papers and the like, but I find it fascinating nonetheless.
It is in Dilsey's section that the story finally comes together. All the battered fragments of the story cohere into a bruised understanding of what has transpired, though I was still lost in many of the details. Here, some of the horrid beauty of Faulkner's language emerges. In one scene, the narrator allows what would be considered an archetypal "window image" of beauty (In Romantic literature, for example) and transforms it into ugliness: "The window was open. A pear tree grew there, close against the house. It was in bloom and the branches scraped against the house and the myriad air, driving in the window, brought into the room the forlorn scent of the blossoms" (352).
But perhaps my favorite line, involves the wailing of the idiot son Benjamin, and to me, represents the "Sound and the Fury" of this tragic family: "Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets" (359). This contradictory statement sums up the complexity, and evasiveness of the entire novel. Who better to symbolize the unseen ticking of the clock and the gradual deterioration of a family than the moaning of an idiot, who is simultaneously given the credit and dismissed all in the same sentence? Benjamin's sounds lead to other "furies" as well, but I'll not spoil it all for you.
Seriously though, Grove has it right--no Southern author nails the plight of the post-Civil War South with more ferocity than Faulkner. It's as if the very air the characters breath has become tainted by the past.
So if you feel like losing yourself in words that will horrify and confuse you, if you consider reading more than just a sally on the beach, then buckle your seatbelts and pick up The Sound and the Fury.
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