The Sound and the Fury

A 1929 novel by William Faulkner that portrays the decline of the Compson family through shifting narrators and fragmented chronology.

Benjy Compson: The cognitively disabled youngest Compson son, whose section moves among memories without chronological order. His associative narration opens the novel and makes time shifts central to its form.
Unreliable narrator: A narrator whose account is limited, distorted, or otherwise not fully dependable. Each Compson section reveals only a partial and differently shaped version of events.
William Faulkner: An American novelist and Nobel laureate whose fiction often depicts the history of the imagined Yoknapatawpha County. He created the Compson family and the novel's distinctive narrative design.
Literary modernism: A movement in literature that challenged inherited forms through formal experimentation and fragmented perspectives. The novel's disrupted chronology and multiple voices exemplify modernist narrative experimentation.
As I Lay Dying: A 1930 novel by William Faulkner told through the shifting voices of the Bundren family and their neighbors. Its many narrators contrast with the four-part structure centered on the Compsons.
Quentin Compson: The eldest Compson son, whose section follows his final day at Harvard in 1910. His fractured consciousness presents the family's past as an unbearable present.
Narrative time: The ordering and duration of events as presented in a narrative. The novel's sections move between remembered past and narrated present in contrasting ways.
Yoknapatawpha County: Faulkner's fictional Mississippi county, the setting for many of his novels and stories. The Compsons belong to the interconnected fictional history Faulkner built around this region.
Modernist novel: A novel shaped by modernist experiments in form, perspective, language, and time. The Sound and the Fury became a widely studied example of this kind of fiction.
The Waste Land: A 1922 poem by T. S. Eliot that uses fragmented voices and cultural references to depict spiritual desolation. Both works make fragmentation carry meaning, but one is a poem and the other a family novel.

Linked from 12 pages