An analysis of William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury.
This paper presents a literary analysis of Faulkner’s “The Sound and The Fury”. The paper presents the thesis that “The Sound and The Fury” is seen to dramatize the deterioration from the past to the present in a manner that pervades almost every scene, and it has themes of disorder, decay and disintegration. The paper analyzes the narration of this work and describes the stream of consciousness technique. The paper points out that “The Sound and the Fury” was a great artistic success, admired by the perceptive few.
“The novel is about the Compson family, its decline and fall, and about the “death of a world.” It is partly narrated by a 33-year-old idiot, Benjy, whose babbling describe his neurotic parents – Jason Compson III, a most effete intellectual, and Caroline Bascomb Compson, a neurasthenic woman who evades reality through constant claims to a gentility long since passed away. His nymphomaniac sister Caddy, and his neurotic brother Quentin, whose incestuous feelings for his sister ultimately drive him to suicide; his other brother, Jason, superbly comic throughout his extreme rascality; Miss Quentin, Caddy’s child, who replicates her mother’s perverted habits, eventually robs Jason, and elopes with a circus performer; and Dilsey, the noble Negro housekeeper, who valiantly strives to keep the disintegrating family together, fails, but personally “endures.””