The Sound and the Fury

Summary

The Sound and the Fury (1929) tells the decline of the Compsons, an old Jefferson, Mississippi family whose house, land and pride are draining away, four times over, from four angles. Three sections are interior monologues by the Compson brothers, and the fourth is told in the third person; none follows clock time in order. The first, dated April 7, 1928 (Holy Saturday and his thirty-third birthday), belongs to Benjy, a man with severe mental disability who cannot speak. His narration slides without warning between the present, in which the servant boy Luster hunts for a lost quarter to go to a travelling show, and memories stretching back to 1898: his grandmother's death, his name being changed from Maury, his sister Caddy's muddy drawers as she climbs a pear tree, her wedding, the day the family sold his pasture to pay for Quentin's Harvard year. Caddy, who loved and protected him, is the centre of his world, and her absence is the source of his howling. The second section, June 2, 1910, follows Quentin on his last day at Harvard. Unable to bear Caddy's loss of virginity and hasty marriage, haunted by his father's cynical sayings about time and honour, he breaks the hands off his grandfather's watch, buys two flat-irons, wanders the Massachusetts countryside with a lost Italian girl, is arrested and released, fights a classmate, and prepares to drown himself in the Charles River. The third section, April 6, 1928 (Good Friday), is the sneering, self-pitying voice of Jason, the brother left at home to support his hypochondriac mother, his brother Benjy and Caddy's illegitimate daughter Quentin. Jason has for years stolen the money Caddy sends for her daughter, while letting his mother burn forged copies of the checks in the belief that she is refusing tainted money; he speculates in cotton, quarrels with everyone, and torments his niece. The fourth section, April 8, 1928, Easter Sunday, moves outside the brothers' minds and follows Dilsey Gibson, the family's aging Black cook, who keeps the house running. Young Quentin has climbed down the pear tree in the night with Jason's hoarded money and run off with a man from the show. While Jason chases her in vain, Dilsey takes Benjy to her church, where a visiting preacher from St. Louis moves the congregation with a sermon on the Resurrection, and Dilsey weeps that she has seen the first and the last. The book ends with Luster driving Benjy the wrong way round the town square and Jason violently turning the carriage until Benjy's world is in its ordered place again. The title comes from Macbeth's speech on life as a tale told by an idiot.

Plot or Argument

• April Seventh, 1928: Benjy on Holy Saturday

  Benjy and Luster walk the fence by the golf course built on the Compsons' sold pasture, where golfers calling for their 'caddie' set off his grief. Italicized shifts carry him to Damuddy's death in 1898, the renaming of 1900, Caddy's first perfume and first lover, her wedding in 1910, his own attack on a schoolgirl at the gate and its aftermath, and his father's death. In the present, Quentin's niece quarrels in the swing with a man in a red tie.

• June Second, 1910: Quentin's last day

  Quentin twists the hands off his watch, packs his belongings, and writes notes. He buys flat-irons, rides trolleys, befriends a silent Italian child, is accused by her brother of kidnapping, and then fights the womanizer Gerald Bland. Memory floods in: Caddy and Dalton Ames, his false confession to his father that he committed incest with her, Caddy's marriage to the banker Herbert Head, and his father's warnings that no battle is ever won. The section ends as he brushes his teeth and leaves.

• April Sixth, 1928: Jason on Good Friday

  Jason narrates a day of grievances: quarrels with his niece over school, a cotton-market loss, a chase after Quentin and the show-man through the countryside, insults to his employer Earl, and his scheme with Caddy's money. Flashbacks recall his father's funeral, Caddy's paid glimpse of her baby, and Benjy's castration. That night he burns two show tickets in front of Luster rather than give them away.

• April Eighth, 1928: Dilsey's Easter

  In third-person narration Dilsey rises in the cold, cooks, quiets Mrs. Compson and Benjy, and learns with the household that Quentin has fled with Jason's money. Dilsey takes Benjy to her church to hear the Rev. Shegog; Jason drives to Mottson after the runaways, is beaten by an old man from the show, and must hire a driver home.

• The square: the ordered place

  Luster drives Benjy to the cemetery and turns left around the Confederate monument instead of right. Benjy bellows; Jason leaps in, strikes Luster and Benjy, and turns the surrey, and Benjy falls silent as the familiar shapes pass in their usual order.

Characters

• Benjamin (Benjy) Compson, narrator of the first section

  Youngest Compson son, born Maury and renamed in 1900 when his disability became plain; mute, dependent, and keenly attached to Caddy, firelight, the pasture and a jimson weed in a bottle. He is castrated after frightening a schoolgirl at the gate.

• Quentin Compson, narrator of the second section

  Eldest son, sent to Harvard on the proceeds of Benjy's pasture; idealistic, tormented by Caddy's sexual history and his father's nihilism, and obsessed with time. He drowns himself in June 1910.

• Jason Compson IV, narrator of the third section

  Third son and his mother's favourite, a store clerk who embezzles his niece's support money, rages against everyone, and calls his own resentment common sense.

• Candace (Caddy) Compson, sister; the absent centre

  Spirited and loving in childhood, she becomes pregnant in 1909, marries Herbert Head, is divorced and banished, and leaves her daughter in Jefferson. She never narrates.

• Miss Quentin, Caddy's daughter

  Seventeen in 1928, raised without love by her uncle and grandmother; she runs off with a show-man and with the money Jason stole from her.

• Dilsey Gibson, family cook and centre of the fourth section

  Aging Black servant who raised the Compson children, shields Benjy and Miss Quentin from Jason, and takes Benjy to her Easter service.

• Jason Compson III, father

  Lawyer and classicist turned cynic, whose sayings about time, virginity and futility echo through Quentin's mind; he drinks himself into decline and dies in 1912.

• Caroline Bascomb Compson, mother

  Self-pitying invalid who takes to her bed, calls her children a judgment on her, and favours Jason.

• Maury Bascomb, Mrs. Compson's brother

  Genial idler who lives on the family's money and carries love letters to a neighbour's wife.

• Luster, Dilsey's grandson

  Teenager charged with minding Benjy in 1928; teasing but not cruel, he spends the novel hunting a quarter for the show.

• Versh, T. P. and Frony, Dilsey's children

  Earlier caretakers of Benjy and servants of the household, whose voices fill Benjy's memories.

• Rev. Shegog, visiting preacher

  Small, unimpressive-looking minister from St. Louis whose Easter sermon moves from polished oratory into the idiom of his congregation.

Lessons

• Time as an enemy, a burden and a gift

  Each brother lives in a different relation to time. Benjy cannot tell past from present, Quentin destroys his watch and his life to escape it, and Jason lives by the clock of the cotton exchange and never has enough of it. Dilsey, who sees 'de first en de last', alone understands time as framed by a beginning and an end that she trusts to God. Reading the novel means asking which relation to time is livable.

  • Why does Quentin twist the hands off his grandfather's watch, and why does it keep ticking?
  • How does Mr. Compson's gift of the watch shape the way Quentin thinks about time?
  • What does Dilsey mean when she says she has seen the beginning and now sees the ending?

• Honour without charity

  Quentin's code of Southern honour is fixed on Caddy's virginity, not on her welfare, and he would rather claim an imagined sin than accept her as she is. Jason has abandoned honour for money and spite. Neither brother loves Caddy or her daughter well. The novel shows a family that keeps the forms of gentility while losing the substance of care, which survives chiefly in Dilsey.

  • What does Quentin want when he tells his father he has committed incest?
  • Is Jason's contempt for his family's pretensions a kind of honesty, or only another form of pride?
  • Who in the novel actually acts to protect Caddy's daughter, and at what cost?

• Seeing a man who cannot speak

  Faulkner opens the novel inside the mind of a man everyone else treats as a burden, a joke or a shame. The family changes his name, sells his pasture and has him castrated; Jason wants him sent to the asylum at Jackson. Readers who struggle through his section learn what he loves and grieves, and are forced to see him as a person rather than a problem. Students can weigh how the family's treatment of Benjy measures its moral condition.

  • What objects and sensations comfort Benjy, and what do they tell us about what he has lost?
  • Why did the family change his name from Maury to Benjamin, and how do the servants interpret the change?
  • How does reading Benjy's section first change the way you judge Jason's remarks about him?

• The Easter sermon and the fallen house

  The three dated days of 1928 are Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday, yet the Compsons experience no resurrection. The Rev. Shegog's sermon on the blood of the Lamb and the 'ricklickshun' is the one moment of shared hope in the book, and it is heard in a Black church to which Dilsey brings Benjy. Faulkner leaves open whether the Easter frame judges the Compsons, consoles Dilsey, or both.

  • How does the sermon change in style as it goes on, and why does that matter to the congregation?
  • Does the Easter dating of the sections suggest hope for the Compsons, or only for Dilsey?
  • Why might Faulkner have placed the novel's only scene of communal worship among the family's servants?

• Why make a novel this hard?

  Faulkner withholds dates, uses the same names for different people (two Quentins, two Jasons, two Maurys) and gives no signposts except italics. The difficulty is part of the meaning: the reader must piece together a family history much as the brothers struggle with memories they cannot order. Students should practise tracking clues (who is caring for Benjy, what season it is) and then ask whether the method earns its demands.

  • In Benjy's section, how can you tell whether a scene belongs to 1898, 1910 or 1928?
  • Why does the fourth section switch to third-person narration?
  • Would the novel be better or worse told in chronological order? Defend your answer with a passage.

Context

The novel was written in 1928, at the height of the 'Southern Renaissance' and in the wake of Joyce's Ulysses (1922), whose interior monologue Faulkner adapted to a Mississippi family. Its world is the Jim Crow South a generation after Reconstruction: white families like the Compsons, descended from governors and generals, have sold their land piece by piece, while Black servants such as Dilsey's family live under segregation and do the work that keeps those households alive. The Compsons' decline mirrors broader changes: the cotton economy, the growth of small-town commerce, the departure of educated sons to the North, and the fading of the Confederate past into monuments on the square. Readers should note that Faulkner's narrators use the racial vocabulary of their time and place, and that the novel's portraits of Black characters were drawn by a white Mississippian of that era.

Composition

Faulkner said he wrote the book in 1928 after his third novel was rejected, beginning from the image of a little girl's muddy drawers as she climbed a tree to look in a window at her grandmother's funeral. He told the story through Benjy, then Quentin, then Jason, and finally in his own voice, later calling the book his 'most splendid failure' because none of the tellings satisfied him. It was published in October 1929 by Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, days before the stock market crash. In 1945 he wrote a 'Compson Appendix' for Malcolm Cowley's The Portable Faulkner, extending the family history; it is not part of the 1929 novel and is not in the library's text.

Reception

Early reviews were divided; some critics praised its power while others found it impenetrable, and sales were small. Its reputation grew after Cowley's Portable Faulkner (1946) revived interest in Faulkner and after the 1949 Nobel Prize. It is now regarded as one of the major American modernist novels and a central text of Southern literature. The 1929 text entered the U.S. public domain on 1 January 2025.

Comparisons

• The Portable Faulkner

  Cowley's anthology prints the Dilsey section and the 1945 Compson Appendix, which gives later fates (Caddy in occupied Paris, Jason's sale of the house) not found in the 1929 novel; students should keep the two layers distinct.

• Macbeth

  The title comes from Macbeth's 'tomorrow' speech, in which life is a tale told by an idiot; Faulkner literalizes the image by opening with Benjy, then asks through Dilsey's Easter whether the tale signifies nothing after all.

• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

  Joyce's stream of consciousness, which grows with Stephen's age from nursery speech to aesthetic theory, is the most direct model for the brothers' monologues; Quentin, like Stephen, is a gifted son crushed by family and religion, but he cannot escape.

• Mrs. Dalloway

  Published four years earlier, Woolf's novel also confines its action to a single June day, follows a suicidal young man's mind beside a society hostess's, and lets clock-time (Big Ben) toll across private memory.

• The Great Gatsby

  Fitzgerald's Gatsby and Faulkner's Quentin both try to stop time and recover a lost girl; Gatsby believes he can repeat the past, while Quentin concludes he can only escape it.

• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  Both novels render Southern speech, Black and white, with close attention to dialect and use the racial language of their settings; comparing Jim and Dilsey shows two white authors depicting Black dignity within a society that denied it.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• CONTENT NOTES (grades 11–12): racial slurs and Jim Crow hierarchy in the narrators' speech; Quentin's sexual shame and planned suicide; Benjy's castration and the cruelty of Jason's jokes about it; coarse language throughout Jason's section.
• In Benjy's section, the caretaker is your clock: Versh means childhood, T. P. means adolescence and 1910, Luster means 1928.
• In Quentin's section, every shadow, chime and watch-tick; note where punctuation disappears and his memory takes over.
• In Jason's section, the money: Caddy's checks, the forged copies his mother burns, the cash box, and the cotton market.
• In the Easter section, how the narration describes Dilsey, Benjy and the Rev. Shegog from outside, and what changes when the preacher's voice changes.

Key terms and names

Interior monologue

Narration that presents a character's thoughts directly as they occur, often skipping logical and chronological links.

Yoknapatawpha County

Faulkner's invented north-Mississippi county, with its seat at Jefferson, the setting of most of his novels and stories.

Jim Crow

The system of laws and customs enforcing racial segregation and subordination in the American South from the 1870s to the 1960s.

Holy Week

The week before Easter; the novel's 1928 sections fall on Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday.

Compson Appendix

A family history Faulkner wrote in 1945 for The Portable Faulkner, later printed with some editions; not part of the 1929 novel.

Italics shift

Faulkner's device of switching to italic type to signal (not always reliably) a jump in time or a remembered voice.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What is Luster looking for at the start of the novel, and why does the word 'caddie' upset Benjy?
2. Comprehension What does Jason do with the checks Caddy sends for her daughter, and how does he deceive his mother about them?
3. Comprehension How does Miss Quentin leave the house on Easter morning, and what does she take?
4. Interpretation Why might Faulkner have refused to give Caddy a section of her own?
5. Interpretation How does Mr. Compson's philosophy contribute to Quentin's despair, and does Quentin misread his father?
6. Interpretation What does the final scene on the square suggest about order, comfort and the Compson family's future?
7. Big Question Is endurance, as Dilsey shows it, a virtue sufficient to answer the despair of the Compsons, or does the novel ask for something more?

Faith Connections

• Ecclesiastes 1:4-11 (Scripture)

  The Preacher's generations that pass while the earth abides, read beside a family that cannot escape its own repetitions of names and failures.

• Revelation 1:8; 21:6 (Scripture)

  Christ as Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, gives the background for Dilsey's 'I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin' after the Easter sermon.

• Matthew 25:40 (Scripture)

  Service to 'the least of these' frames Dilsey's care for Benjy, whom his own family treats as a disgrace.

• Macbeth V.v.19-28 (Great Conversation)

  Macbeth's speech on life as an idiot's tale supplies the title; students can ask whether Benjy's section proves Macbeth right or, read with the Easter section, refutes him.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: A family that keeps the forms of honour while abandoning love and responsibility destroys itself, and only a faith that sees time whole, as Dilsey does, can bear to witness that collapse.

Rhetorical device: motif. Clocks and watches recur from Quentin's broken watch to the Compson kitchen clock that strikes the wrong hour while Dilsey correctly says one o'clock, tying each character's grasp of truth to his or her relation to time.

Debate: Resolved: Quentin Compson's despair is chiefly the fault of his father's teaching.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Choose one of the three brothers and argue that his narrative style is itself a moral portrait of him, using at least three passages.

Comparison with Macbeth: Read Macbeth's 'tomorrow and tomorrow' speech beside the final pages of The Sound and the Fury and argue whether Faulkner's novel finally agrees with Macbeth that life signifies nothing.

Medical Lens

The novel is a literary portrait, not a case history, and Faulkner gives Benjy no diagnosis; retrospective labels for him are readings only. What the text does show in detail is how a family and town in the 1900s–1920s treated a disabled son: renaming, confinement to the yard, the threat of the state asylum at Jackson, and surgical castration after an encounter at the gate is taken as an assault. Quentin's section traces the planning of a suicide with obsessive attention to time and to his father's despairing philosophy; readers may see melancholia in it, but the novel frames it in terms of honour, shame and sin. Mrs. Compson's chronic invalidism, Uncle Maury's supposed ill health, Mr. Compson's drinking, and Jason's headaches treated with camphor are portraits of a household that turns illness into a language of grievance. Teachers should preview the suicide and the castration before assigning.

• April Seventh, 1928 (memories of 1898–1910)

  Benjy's sensory narration, with the renaming from Maury to Benjamin, the family's talk of his condition, and the servants' superstition about the name change.

  Disability Deformity
• April Seventh, 1928 (memory of 1910)

  Benjy runs at the schoolgirls passing the gate; Jason predicts he will be sent to Jackson and blames the family for leaving the gate open.

  Asylum Institution Disability Deformity
• April Seventh, 1928 (remembered supper)

  Mrs. Compson frets about her brother's bad health and her son; Mr. Compson replies with a speech on disease and decay and calls for the decanter to be filled.

  Hypochondria Alcohol
• June Second, 1910

  Quentin buys two flat-irons, imagines his bones on the river bottom and the irons rising at the Resurrection, and recalls his father's arguments that despair is temporary, which he refuses.

  Suicide Melancholia Depression
• April Sixth, 1928

  Jason's headaches and camphor, his mockery of his mother's aspirin, his account of Mr. Compson sitting all day with the decanter, and his crude reference to Benjy's castration.

  Pain Hypochondria Alcohol Sexuality Medicalized Disability Deformity

Creative Prompts

• Classroom

  Build a timeline wall for Benjy's section: assign each italic shift to 1898, 1900, 1909–10 or 1928 using clues such as which servant is minding him, then compare results.

• Fiction

  Write the section Faulkner never gave Caddy: a page in her voice on the day she returns to Jefferson and pays Jason to let her see her daughter.

• Essay

  Argue whether Dilsey is the moral centre of the novel or whether Faulkner deliberately refuses to give it one, using the Easter sermon and the final scene on the square.

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation between Dilsey and Jason, after the novel ends, in which they argue over whether Benjy should be sent to Jackson.

Further Reading

• Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner

  Quentin Compson returns as listener and narrator, months before his death.

• As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

  The next experiment in multiple narrators, shorter and more accessible.

• The Portable Faulkner, William Faulkner (ed. Malcolm Cowley)

  Contains the Compson Appendix.

• William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country, Cleanth Brooks

• Faulkner: A Biography, Joseph Blotner