“On William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury”
This chapter is an essay reviewing William Faulkner's novel, The Sound and the Fury, the tragic story of the fall of a house, the collapse of a provincial aristocracy in a final debacle of insanity, recklessness, psychological perversion. Book I is a statement of the tragedy as seen through the eyes of Benjy. Book II focuses on Quentin, who is contemplating suicide. In Book III we see the world in terms of the petty, sadistic lunacy of Jason, the last son of the family. The final Book is told in the third person by the author and primarily focuses on Dilsey, an old colored woman. The Sound and the Fury seems to answer the question of whether there exists for this age of disillusion with religion, dedication to the objective program of scientific inventiveness and general rejection of the teleology which placed man emotionally at the center of his universe, the spirit of which great tragedy is the expression.