The Sound and the Fury
Published in 1929, The Sound and the Fury traces the collapse of the Compson family in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. The novel unfolds in four sections, each with a distinct narrator and timeframe. The opening section is voiced by Benjy, a man with a cognitive disability whose perception ignores chronology. The second belongs to his brother Quentin, a Harvard student consumed by obsession with his sister Caddy and the family's lost honor. The third is told by the bitter, scheming brother Jason, and the final section centers on the Black servant Dilsey. Faulkner uses stream of consciousness, shifting time, and unreliable memory to dramatize a family's moral and financial ruin. The book is regarded as a landmark of literary modernism and one of Faulkner's most demanding works.
What you might want to know about The Sound and the Fury
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
The decline of a once-prominent Southern family told through four fractured, overlapping perspectives.
It uses stream of consciousness, jumps in time, and unreliable narrators, especially in its first two sections.
It comes from a line in Shakespeare's Macbeth about life being a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.
The Sound and the Fury was written by William Faulkner, published in 1929 by Penguin.
The Sound and the Fury is 321 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Sound and the Fury takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
The Sound and the Fury is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.