The Sound and the Fury (Modern Library Series)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The novel reveals the story of the disintegration of the Compson family, doomed inhabitants of Faulkner's mythical Yoknapatawpha County, through the interior monologues of the idiot Benjy and his brothers, Quentin and Jason.

SYNOPSIS

The Sound and the Fury is made up of undifferentiated streams of consciousness that ultimately turn out to be the inner voices of a family's siblings. Its construction is so masterful that the last sentence refers the reader back to the first one, as any perfect work of art might do.

Sound has the earmarks of a modern psychological study, although the book was published in 1929. It is a dramatic and harrowing tale of the Compson family's pathology—primarily in the form of incest and incestuous thoughts.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

For all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man. Thus we must return to him for that continuity of moral purpose which made for the greatness of our classics.  — Ralph Ellison

Faulkner performed a labor of imagination that has not been equaled in our time�first, to invent a Mississippi county that was like a mythical kingdom, that was complete and living in all its details; second, to make his story of Yoknapatawpha County stand as a parable legend of all the Deep South.
 — Malcolm Cowley

Faulkner� belongs to the full-dressed post-Flaubert group of Conrad, Joyce, and Proust.  — Edmund Wilson

For all the range of effect, philosophical weight, originality of style, variety of characterization, humor, and tragic intensity [Faulkner's works] are without equal in our time and country.  — Robert Penn Warren