The Sound and the Fury

About this book

The decline of the Compson family, once great landowners in Jefferson, Mississippi, is told four times. First through the mind of Benjy, a man with a severe mental disability for whom past and present are mixed together; then through his brother Quentin, a Harvard student, on a single day in June 1910, haunted by memories of their sister; then through the bitter, greedy brother Jason; and finally through a narrator who follows Dilsey, the family's Black cook, whose strength holds the house together. At the centre of all of them is their lost sister, Caddy.

Context and significance

William Faulkner (1897–1962), who won the Nobel Prize in 1949, published the novel in 1929, and its title comes from Macbeth's speech about life as 'a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury'. Difficult but rewarding, it is one of the great experimental novels of the century. Read Macbeth, and compare Joyce's Ulysses.

About the author