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The Sound and the Fury

Thesis Statement

Effects and reviews of “The Sound and the Fury”

Introduction

The Sound and the Fury was published to a number of favorable reviews. Lyle Saxon, for instance, in New York Herald Tribune Books on October 13, 1929, rightly observed that Faulkner "achieved a novel of extraordinary effect." The narrative technique of the interior monologue prevalent throughout the novel is a clear influence of James Joyce's Ulysses. The use of this narrative device, as Michael Groden has pointed out in "Criticism in New Composition: Ulysses and The Sound and the Fury," published in Twentieth Century Literature 21 (October 1975), provided Faulkner with "a solution to crucial problems in characterization that had plagued him in his first three novels". The interior monologue combined, as it is in the first three chapters of the novel, with first person narration, provides an intimate view of the narrator's thoughts, attitudes, feelings, and impressions, although it may also pose for readers serious interpretative challenges; the first chapter in particular may be the most problematic of all. One of the most baffling and troubling experiences many readers may have when confronting the novel for the first time is that of narrative indeterminacy.

Even after readers progress through the novel, they may still wonder whether the first chapter could have actually been narrated by someone like Benjy, by someone who lacks language. In his assessment of the issue, Noel Polk mentions that Benjy is "nonlingual" and in the strict sense "not a narrator at all"; the language of the first chapter then is not his but Faulkner's. Benjy's experience of the world around him is immediate, and, as Polk rightly observes, the narrative account of his awareness at any one give moment "is almost completely visual, cinematic, and what rolls through his mind is ...