The Sound and the Fury

William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury is widely considered the Mount Everest of American fiction — magnificent, punishing, and worth every step. Published in 1929, it tells the story of the Compson family's disintegration in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. But "tells" is a misleading verb. This novel doesn't tell; it immerses, confuses, and finally illuminates.

The book is divided into four sections, each narrated from a different perspective. The first — and most notoriously difficult — belongs to Benjy Compson, a man with a severe intellectual disability whose mind moves between past and present without warning or punctuation to guide you. The second section follows his brother Quentin, a Harvard student drowning in obsessive thought on the day he will take his own life. The third belongs to the venomous, petty Jason. The fourth pulls back to a third-person view centered on Dilsey, the family's Black servant, who is the novel's moral anchor.

Faulkner once said he wrote the novel four times because he could never get it right. That restless ambition shows. The Sound and the Fury is not easy, but it rewards patience with moments of devastating beauty. The Compson family's collapse mirrors the decline of the old South itself, and Faulkner renders both with unflinching honesty and extraordinary technical daring.

The Sound and the Fury earns its place because it permanently expanded what the novel could do. Before Faulkner, stream of consciousness was a European experiment. After The Sound and the Fury, it became a central tool of American literature. The novel proved that difficulty and beauty are not opposites — that a book could demand everything from its reader and give back more than it took.

Faulkner's influence on subsequent writers is almost immeasurable. Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Gabriel García Márquez, and dozens of others have cited this novel specifically as a turning point in their understanding of what fiction could achieve. The Benjy section alone — narrated by a mind that experiences time as a flat circle — anticipates techniques that writers would spend the next century trying to replicate.

But influence aside, the novel endures because the Compsons feel real in a way that literary families rarely do. Their failures are not abstract or symbolic. They are painfully, recognizably human — born from pride, grief, cruelty, and the terrible gravity of the past.

Published in 1929, The Sound and the Fury was not a commercial success initially but became the cornerstone of Faulkner's reputation. It directly contributed to his 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. The novel has been translated into dozens of languages and is a staple of university literature curricula worldwide. It was adapted into films in 1959 (starring Yul Brynner) and 2014 (starring James Franco). Faulkner's creation of Yoknapatawpha County — which spans this and fourteen other novels — is considered one of the most ambitious achievements in literary world-building. The Modern Library ranked The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century.