William Faulkner's Sound and The Fury - when order unravels
The Sound and the Fury was William Faulkner's fourth novel and his "most splendid failure". This tension summarises the feelings of many readers, combining admiration and bafflement in equal measure.
by William Faulkner
Jonathan Cape/Harrison Smith
The Sound and the Fury was William Faulkner's fourth novel and his "most splendid failure". This tension summarises the feelings of many readers, combining admiration and bafflement in equal measure.
Faulkner was no exception, it seems. He wrote and rewrote this story of the disintegrating Compson family who had for decades lived in splendour in Mississippi. Having completed three sections, narrated by different characters using different narrative forms, Faulkner remained dissatisfied: "And that failed and I tried myself - the fourth section - to tell what happened, and I still failed."
The title comes from a famous soliloquy in William Shakespeare's Macbeth: "It is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing."
These sentiments are echoed in the second section when the sensitive but troubled Quentin hears birdsong: "The bird whistled again, invisible, a sound meaningless and profound, inflexionless, ceasing as though cut off with the blow of a knife, and again, and that sense of water swift and peaceful above secret places, felt, not seen not heard."