http://www.fnordinc.com/2009/06-28/bo...

the sound and the fury -i picked this book up at goodwill, for a buck and change. i had heard it was good, but never got around to reading it.

turns out, it is one of the best books i have ever read.

set in a combination of locals and times, varied themes and ideals are put forward depending on which section you are reading. the story is broken into 4 parts, each part is told from the perspective of a different individual, all related in some way to the Compson family.

it mainly breaks down the destruction of a family and all they know. mentally, physically, emotionally, you watch as they self destruct.

i will not go into too much detail on the actual story as the book is 80 years old. you can find fantastic plot break downs all over the web.

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the first section was absolutely unbearable. i almost put down the book and gave up entirely. carried out in about a hundred pages, it is told entirely from the view point of Benjy Compson.

sound/fury is presented as stream of consciousness. benjy has no internal clock. he swaps back and forth mid stream giving narrative from 4-5 different times in his life. characters are mixed around and nothing makes sense in the slightest.

…….. from there the book gets phenomenal.

luckily, were you to reread the first chapter after finishing the book, it is far more intelligible.

i highly suggest reading this book.. even if it takes you 2 weeks to make it through the first chapter as i did.. it is worth slogging through it in order to get to the next portion. the second reading makes far more sense, but would utterly fail if you skipped it and went back to it later. it sets the mood and gets your brain mixed up enough to easily assimilate the next three.

that's all i have..

mmm. good..

I could not appreciate or understand the apparent power of this novel until it was finished, or nearly so. Upon reaching the final chapter, Faulkner's long beautifully structured prose appears, and it is a marked departure from the stream-of-consciousness fragmented sentencing that so characterize the early chapters. It is then that his narrative and descriptive power finally, finally, finally provides the stable narrative reference point I hungered for throughout the early chapters.

It is a great tragedy that these Comptons must blunder and bluster through their lives as the family slowly falls in on itself. They seem caught in an almost deterministic mold, which is partially genetic, partially cultural, and mostly familial. Watching this process becomes compulsive after a while, and you keep returning to the book, despite its complexity. I am not a great fan of Faulkner, but I appreciate a finely wrought story. Innovative in it's time, we have become more accustomed to the stream-of-consciousness style of writing and the wholesale lack of narrator intrusion that characterizes much modern literature. Nevertheless, a 21st-century reading of it - given our familiarity with Faulkner's greatness - is no less challenging. I should like to re-read The Sound and the Fury at some point.

Totally dysfunctional family.
Rantings of a madman?
Incomprehensible.
Brilliant.

You want to put it aside but can't until you have finished it.
Keeps you thinking and pondering - what's going on? ( )

This is a wonderful book that requires some patience and focus to read. But it is worth it. Ultimately it is about a family-- the good, the bad, the ugly. This may not be your family but there's something in here that everyone can relate to. There's a nice review posted already that I think would be an excellent reading guide, chapter by chapter and character by character. (I'd read the book first, and then go back and use a guide if needed). Faulkner's ability to offer the different perspectives and voices is unsurpassed and really highlights his versatility. For those who are daunted at first: the first chapter is by far the most challenging to read and decipher, it gets easier. If you are a reader who just wants to know what happens and does not revel in the language and telling of the tale itself you should not read this book. ( )

This is a very powerful book, though that is not what you think about the book as you begin reading it. In fact through the first half of the book you feel many things, not very many of those feelings are very positve. The book is broken down into 4 chapters with the first 3 chapters being narrations by the three brothers and then the final chapter being Faulkner's voice as he finishes the story that he is trying to tell.

Faulkner starts the book with Benjy narrating the first chapter in what has to be one of the most unreadable, frustrating, incomprehensible chapters ever written. Benjy is an autistic, mentally retarded son of an old southern family that has slowly faded from the grand old days of the south to near collapse. But you won't actually know that after the first chapter, in fact you won't know a whole lot about anything. As you begin the second chapter, which is wrritten by Quentin, there is still a disorganized, discombobulated structure to the narration. But as I read it, I felt a sublte difference in the second voice of Quentin and the original voice of Benjy. The second chapter is confusing also but in the first chapter, Faulkner is attacking the reader.

All readers come to a book with simple, straight forward, linear ways of percieving the novel that they are reading. Faulkner could have chosen his own voice to start the book, one that explains and gets the reader hooked into the story before introducing the narration of Benjy. But Faulkner does not do this, instead he chooses Benjy to begin the narration and as he does this he attacks the reader's perceptions and stability; he does not ask us to understand or empathize with the characters, he forces us to feel what they feel. Faulkner wants us to feel the Sound and the Fury.

Benjy does not attack the reader, Benjy just is. He has little or no logic, no real ability to think in a linear or even in an elliptical fashion for that matter, Benjy just percieves the world viscerally. He hears, he tastes, he smells, he touches, he sees and in his narration he swirls all that together and narrates it for us. But what Faulkner does is take that swirl and disorients the reader, frustrates the readers perceptions so that the reader begins to understand the Sound and the Fury that all the characters feel as they live in the midst of Sound and the Fury. We get the ability to understand, not the events that have occured to the characters in the past 33 years (or more to the point, in the past 100 years), but the result of what has happened to them for the past 33 years in a very visceral way. We end up being angry, frustrated, disoriented and dazed from reading the onslaught that is Benjy's narration. As he describes his own consternation and rage at the life he is in, we feel the Sound and the Fury ourselves because our perceptions are being attacked by the writer. As the moaning, and the wailing, and the "bellering" occurs page after page, the reader feels the overwhelming Sound of that narration. You may not understand what he is saying, but page after page you are attacked with the sound and the fury of his narration. As Benjy experiences his life, there is precious little happiness or comfort, there is only an ongoing expression of outrage and of Fury. The first time you read Benjy's chapter, there is a feeling of having been attacked, not by Benjy, but by Faulkner. He leaves you feeling the Sound and the Fury.

As the second chapter begins, Quentin's voice is also disorganized and unreadable, except that there is a subtle difference. This time reader is not being attacked, but rather we are reading the narrative of someone who has lived so long inside the Sound and the Fury that his thinking has been compromised. Quentin is not autistic, he is in fact bright and capable. And through his narrative we begin to see that the Sound and Fury is not just a crazy family, but that this crazy family is inseparable from it's legacy and history as a part of the genteel Southern ruling class of the old plantation days when their family owned slaves and ruled with impunity. That the loss of this structure has made it impossible for them to move froward but rather to slowly sink into alcoholism (the father), chronic hypochondria (the mother) and sexual addiction (the sister). The first two are not important to Quentin but his sister is his lifeline and without her he will sink. He does everything he knows to do to stop her but in the end he fails. He offers to kill her and she agrees but he can not cut her throat. He offers to committ incest (or does commit incest) with her to break the spell other men have on her, but in the end she continues on with the other men. In an effort to save his son, the father sells some of the land and sends him North to Harvard to give him a chance to escape. But without his sister he can not go on. The North and his friends and Harvard mean nothing to him. He is more foreign in that land than the immigrant Italians that he meets. When he is accused of child molestation, his friends are horrified and come to his rescue. But Quentin thinks it is funny. Everyone is acting as if the accusation that he would molest a child is a terrrible thing, but Quentin knows what terrible is. It is the Sound and the Fury that his father tried to give him a chance to escape from, but he knows he will not escape it. And as the reader we know it to. I know 7 people who have tried to read this book. Three of them have never finished it and three more of us had to try a second time in order to be able to finish it. We experienced the Sound and the Fury and quit reading the book before finishing the first chapter. Quentin did not have to just read a chapter of the Sound and the Fury, he lived it all his life and like many of us that start the book, he just did not care how it ended. He just wanted to quit also; and so he does.

The third chapter is the voice of Jason, the youngest son. The ambiguity and disorganization are gone. This is one cold hearted bastard. There is no sign of compromised thinking or morality. He is amoral, ruthless and oppurtunistic. He wants what he wants and is willing to do what it takes to get it. His hatred of Jews and Blacks is unrelenting. He is attached to his mother but this does not keep him from being repeatedly cruel to her or from hating women. But he is not just angry, he hates everyone else. Not just for what they have done to him personally either, but for what has happened to his class, the ones that owned eveything and controlled everything. He hates everything that has happened to them and to himself. His voice is the loudest and the clearest. It is also the most frightening and chilling. Jason is the embodiment of the Sound and the Fury.

The fourth chapter is the voice of Faulkner. When you read about Faulkner and his "genuis" you expect to read his book and it be a thing of beauty. And so is the fourth Chapter. He ends the story of the Compson family and then brings front and center Dilsey the Mammy that has been with the family since birth. She has done everyting she can to keep the family together and tries to keep finding a way to help the family heal from the Sound and the Fury. But she has her heart broken in the end by Jason who's cruelly runs the last of the family (Miss Quentin) away to a fate that will be the same as the other family members, "I have seen the beginning and the end". But then Faulkner ends the book with hope and seems to predict that what will bring about a new South is not the North, or government, or whitemen or women, but the new South will arise and be resurrected by Blacks that were born and raised in the South. It is Dilsey and her family that go to a "new" Easter service at the end of the book. One where the only white person there is the emasculated Benjy. Faulkner wrote this book in 1929, long before a lady by the name of Rosa Parks said, "No I won't sit in the back of the bus no more", and a black man from Georgia gave a speech that said "I have been to the Mountain Top, and I have seen the Promised Land". And the "Sound and the Fury" did not go down easily even in the 60's. But just like Faulkner said, it was a black woman named Rosa Parks and a black man named Martin Luther King Jr that brought it to it's knees and helped all of us to reach the new South where the Sound and the Fury no longer strangles us all. ( )