The Sound and the Fury
1929
The Sound and the Fury is William Faulkner's radical experiment in rendering consciousness itself. The novel follows the crumbling Compson family across three decades, told through four distinct voices that fracture time itself. Benjy, a 33-year-old man with a child's mind, experiences the present as an endless loop of memory, his world collapsing as his beloved sister Caddy drifts away. His section opens the novel, and from the first page we are dropped into a mind where past and present bleed together, where a golf ball becomes a shriek of pain, where time moves not in sequence but in emotion. <br><br>Through the eyes of Benjy, his tormented brother Quentin, bitter Jason, and finally the steadfast Dilsey, Faulkner maps the slow suicide of a Southern family too hollowed by pride and tradition to save itself. Caddy is the heart of the novel, the figure everyone loves and everyone loses, and her disappearance propels each character toward their separate ruin. The prose is demanding, beautiful, and sometimes unbearable to read. It was not immediately successful upon publication in 1929, but it has since become recognized as one of the great achievements of American literature, a novel that asked what happens to a family, a region, and a people when history moves on and leaves them behind. It is for readers who want to be transformed by a book, who trust that difficulty yields reward.
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“...I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.””
— William Faulkner
“Clocks slay time... time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.””
— William Faulkner
“Wonder. Go on and wonder.””
— William Faulkner
“Some days in late August at home are like this, the air thin and eager like this, with something in it sad and nostalgic and familiar...””
— William Faulkner
“Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.””
— William Faulkner
“A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired but then time is your misfortune””
— William Faulkner
“It's not when you realise that nothing can help you - religion, pride, anything - it's when you realise that you don't need any aid.””
— William Faulkner
“She loved him not only in spite of but because he himself was incapable of love.””
— William Faulkner
“When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o' clock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather's and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.””
— William Faulkner
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<a href="https://lex-books.com/book/the-sound-and-the-fury-66607682-2b42-411e-aa21-16dd36520610"><img src="https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg" alt="Read The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner free on Lex" width="160" height="40"></a>[](https://lex-books.com/book/the-sound-and-the-fury-66607682-2b42-411e-aa21-16dd36520610)[url=https://lex-books.com/book/the-sound-and-the-fury-66607682-2b42-411e-aa21-16dd36520610][img]https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg[/img][/url]Read The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner free on Lex: https://lex-books.com/book/the-sound-and-the-fury-66607682-2b42-411e-aa21-16dd36520610Cite this book
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Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-sound-and-the-fury-66607682-2b42-411e-aa21-16dd36520610.Faulkner, W. (1929). The Sound and the Fury. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-sound-and-the-fury-66607682-2b42-411e-aa21-16dd36520610Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-sound-and-the-fury-66607682-2b42-411e-aa21-16dd36520610.
