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| The Sound and the Fury |
William Faulkner begins The Sound and the Fury inside the mind of a man who cannot speak, cannot organize time, and experiences the world as a continuous present in which the past is always, fully, happening. It is a genuinely disorienting opening, and it is meant to be. If you push through the confusion, something extraordinary becomes available.
Benjy Compson narrates the first section through sense rather than sequence — a smell of trees means a particular memory surfaces, a particular name triggers another. His consciousness is like a river with no bank: everything flows together, past and present indistinguishable, emotion present and precise even when chronology is entirely absent. Faulkner's rendering of this mind is one of modernism's most technically ambitious achievements, and it works because Benjy feels things completely even while he cannot organize or articulate what he feels.
Quentin's section — the second — operates at a different register of torment. He is all organization and articulation, which is its own problem: his consciousness is a trap he cannot stop running around inside. He thinks in circles around his sister Caddy, around honor, around a Southern code of values that has already ceased to mean what it was supposed to mean. His section takes place on the day he dies, a fact that gives every digression and memory the quality of a last look.
Jason arrives third with bitter, comic, corrosive energy. He is small-minded and furiously self-righteous, nursing grievances with the devotion other people give to religion. He is also, in an uncomfortable way, often funny — Faulkner's portrait of petty cruelty has the precision of a very good caricature.
At the center of all three male voices, present in each one differently, is Caddy — who never narrates, who exists entirely through the way her brothers need and remember and distort her. She is the novel's great absence, and that structural choice is Faulkner's deepest insight into how men relate to women: as projections, as needs, as symbols, rather than as people with their own interior lives.
The Sound and the Fury is not an easy book, and it doesn't become one on second reading. But it rewards sustained attention with something few novels offer: the feeling that you have been inside consciousness itself, in all its beautiful, damaged, unresolvable complexity.
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