The Sound and the Fury

Where the book came from

Faulkner told the story of the book many times at the University of Virginia in 1957 and 1958, where students recorded his classes. It always began with one picture. A little girl climbs a tree to look through the parlor window, while her brothers wait below, and they see the muddy seat of her underwear. The girl became Caddy.

He meant it as a short story of about a thousand words. It would not stay that size. He told it through Benjy, and that was not enough. He told it again through Quentin, then through Jason. Finally he told it himself, in the fourth section, and he said that failed too.

Asked why Caddy never tells her own part, he said she was too beautiful and too moving to reduce to telling what was going on. He thought it would be more passionate to see her through someone else's eyes. In the same class he called her his heart's darling.

That's the one that I love the best for the reason that it was the most splendid failure.

Four brothers, four ways of telling

Each section has a date for a title, not a name. The order is 7 April 1928, 2 June 1910, 6 April 1928 and 8 April 1928. Three of the four fall on Easter weekend in 1928. Quentin's day comes eighteen years earlier.

Benjy's section is the hardest to start. Faulkner admitted that opening with it was a bad method, and said he had shifted the sections back and forth before deciding. He put Benjy first because Benjy did not know what he was seeing, so his memories were the plain groundwork of the story.

Quentin's section is the longest, at about 32,000 words. His thoughts run together without capitals or full stops for pages at a time. He cannot stop thinking about Caddy losing her virginity, about her marriage and about time itself, which his father's gift of the watch keeps in front of him.

Jason's section is the easiest to follow and the ugliest to read. He is the brother who stayed home. He is angry at everyone and funny in a mean way. He sneers at Jews, at Black people, at women and at his own family. Faulkner put it simply when a student asked. Jason was bad, he said, and Quentin was weak.

The last section steps outside all three heads. It follows Dilsey, the family's Black cook, from before dawn on Easter morning. Faulkner picked her out as the good person in the book, holding the family together for no reward. That praise has its limits. In another class he said the human will to prevail would even take what he called the nether channel of the Black race.

Race and violence in the novel

The Compsons depend on the Black family that works for them. Dilsey cooks and keeps the house going, and her grandson Luster watches Benjy. The white Compsons give the orders and complain. The Black characters do the work and keep Benjy calm.

The n-word appears about 75 times in the 1929 text. It turns up in all four sections, and most often in Jason's, where it is part of his running contempt. Quentin uses it too, in his thoughts about the South he has left behind in Mississippi.

The book also contains violence that it tells only in pieces. As a young man Benjy grabs a schoolgirl at the gate, thinking she is Caddy, and the family has him castrated. Quentin drowns himself in Massachusetts at the end of his day. Jason steals, for years, the money Caddy sends to raise her daughter.

The title, and James Joyce

The title comes from Macbeth's speech about life as a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. Faulkner said it had nothing to do with Macbeth's character. He liked the ring of the words.

The method owes a debt to the Irish novelist James Joyce, whose Ulysses follows the unedited thoughts of its characters. Asked in 1957 whether Joyce had influenced him, Faulkner said yes, a great deal. Donald Kartiganer, writing in the Mississippi Encyclopedia, calls the novel Faulkner's great breakthrough, with its abrupt scene shifts, looping time and inner monologue.

Paris, before and after

Faulkner spent the autumn of 1925 in a room at 26 rue Servandoni, near the Jardin du Luxembourg. The City of Paris later put a plaque on the building. He said he went out of his way to the café Joyce used, just to look at him. He wrote The Sound and the Fury about three years later, back in Mississippi.

The novel reached French readers in 1938. Éditions Gallimard published it as Le Bruit et la fureur, translated and introduced by Maurice-Edgar Coindreau. In June 1939 Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about it in La Nouvelle Revue française. He asked why Faulkner had broken up the time of his story and shuffled the pieces, and argued that time itself was Faulkner's real subject.

Coindreau's translation stayed in print in France for more than eighty years. Gallimard published a new translation by Charles Recoursé in 2025.