The effect is disarming and immediate, and while it can be very engaging, I can see how many readers would be alienated to the point that they can’t finish the book. Similarly, Faulkner’s Compsons are unable to directly name their own tragedies of promiscuity, suicide, alcoholism, madness, and financial decline. Other times, Bloom seems unable to even think the words that would name the tragedies of his life (his dead son, his unfaithful wife, his outsider status in Dublin). Often, that context comes much, much later in the novel, with the net result that at times Bloom’s stream of consciousness is awfully ambiguous. One of the things that makes Ulysses challenging is that Leopold Bloom frequently elides specific referents–we often get a “him” or a “he” or a “she” or an “it” without immediate context. Also, reading TSatF, I couldn’t help but feel the subtle resonance of Ulysses, particular in the constant use of omission. I read both of those books years before The Sound and the Fury, and I would make a subjective argument that they are quite a bit easier to enter into in terms of linearity and plot structure. I suppose that at the time of its publication in 1929, literary audiences were at least somewhat familiar–if not wholly intrigued by–the stream-of-consciousness technique pioneered in books like James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. I’m actually kinda sorta shocked that the book was published at all, and I really wonder about its earliest audiences–how much context did they have? What guided them through the verbal detritus of the book’s first half? The first section of the book, told from the perspective of Benjy, the seminal Faulknerian idiot man-child, is particulalry daunting, especially if you have no prior knowledge of the story of the Compson family, and I don’t think I would’ve made it through this reading if I didn’t arleady know the major themes and the trajectory of the plot.

I’d attempted it a few times before, only to be thwarted by an inability to commit to the sustained concentration required to comprehend Faulkner’s stream-of-consciousness technique.

I’ve read a number of Faulkner novels now, and The Sound and the Fury was easily my favorite.

I’ll cop out and be vague but honest: the book was astounding and exhausting. I don’t really know if there’s anything new I can say about Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury in a blog post, and I’m not in the practice of writing term papers here, and you wouldn’t want to read one anyway.

Faulkner william the sound and the fury