Ever since the first furore was created on publication day in 1929, The Sound and the Fury has been considered one of the key novels of the twentieth century.
Depicting the gradual disintegration of the Compson family through four fractured narratives, The Sound and the Fury explores intense, passionate family relationships wherein there is no love, only selfcentredness. At its heart this is a novel about lovelessness - ’only an idiot has no grief; only a fool would forget it. What else is there in this world sharp enough to stick to your guts?’
THERE is a story told of a celebrated Russian dancer, who was asked by someone what she meant by a certain dance. She answered with some exasperation, "If I could say it in so many words, do you think I should take the very great trouble of dancing it?" It is an important story, because it is the valid explanation of obscurity in art. A method involving apparent obscurity is surely justified when it is the clearest, the simplest, the only method possible of saying in full what the writer has to say. This is the case with The Sound and the Fury. I shall not attempt to give either a summary or an explanation of it: for if I could say in three pages what takes Mr Faulkner three hundred there would obviously be no need for the book. All I propose to do is to offer a few introductory, and desultory, comments, my chief purpose being to encourage the reader. For the general reader is quite rightly a little shy of apparently difficult writing. Too often it is used, not because of its intrinsic necessity, but to drape the poverty of the writer: too often the reader, after drilling an arduous passage through the strata of the mountain, finds only the mouse, and has little profit but his exercise.
