The Sound and the Fury

The Sound and the Fury is a novel by the American writer William Faulkner, published in 1929.

It was his fourth novel and the first about the Compson family, and it is built as four narrations rather than one. The opening section belongs to Benjy, whose mind holds thirty years at once and who cannot tell the reader what changed; the second to Quentin, at Harvard, on the day he takes his own life; the third to Jason, whose small cruelties are described without any of the softening the others give their own cases. The last section steps back and follows the household through the eyes of the family's servant, Dilsey, and the four of them add up to a history of a Mississippi family whose decline is bound to slavery, money, alcohol, and the way its members treat the one daughter who does not fit. Faulkner wrote it while working as a night watchman, using stream of consciousness and sudden unannounced leaps in time, and it sold badly until his next novel brought him a wider readership.

It is now treated as one of the defining American novels of the twentieth century and as a central example of Southern Gothic writing.