Novel
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner · 1929
Synopsis
On 7 April 1928, his thirty-third birthday, Benjy Compson, a man with a child's mind, follows a golf game along a fence and moans whenever a player shouts caddie, a word that sounds like the name of his sister Caddy. He distinguishes neither periods nor persons: a smell, a gesture sends him back without transition to scenes from his childhood. Three further parts then retell the family's story: that of his brother Quentin, a student at Harvard, on 2 June 1910; that of Jason, on 6 April 1928; then a third-person narrative, on 8 April 1928.
Context
Written after the rejection of an earlier manuscript, at a time when its author said that a door had closed between him and the publishers, the book appeared on 7 October 1929 from Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, in a print run of 1,789 copies. Its title comes from Macbeth's soliloquy. Faulkner had wanted to print the first section in coloured inks according to the periods; the idea was not realised until 2012. When Malcolm Cowley published an anthology, The Portable Faulkner, in 1946, most of his novels were out of print; Faulkner added an appendix on the Compsons.
Who it is for
A novel in four parts, the first three in the first person; the first, with no markers of time, is the most difficult. Translated by Maurice-Edgar Coindreau in 1938, then by Charles Recoursé in 2025.
Prizes and reception
Fewer than two thousand copies sold in two years; asked in 1957 about his finest failure, Faulkner named this book, the one that had cost him the most work.
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