In the name of him

William Faulkner is one of those writers that one should not approach without preparation and comprehensively. If you only want to read a book of his for the sake of his popularity, it will surely disappoint you and you will hate him and his works for the rest of your life. But if you have the patience to read his novels (and they are difficult and demanding), you will get a pleasure from his works that few other writers can give. And this is where Faulkner becomes one of your favorite writers.

I myself have read their most famous work, "The Sound and the Fury," three times to fully understand it and get abundant pleasure from it. And it is obvious that these three readings were not in vain, but this story has such an attraction that it has tempted the eager reader to do such a thing. Of course, my work also progresses with two readings. If I had not read a very bad edition of the scientific and cultural publications for the first time, an edition that not only has a small and inappropriate font but also does not respect the main writing of the book and has made the difficulty of the novel a little more. Let's say that in December, I read this book twice in a row, first with the translation of Bahman Shaegh-var and the editing of Manouchehr Anvar (published by Negah), and then with the translation of Saleh Hosseini and the editing of Houshang Golshiri (published by Niloufar). And incidentally, this sequence was very effective. What I got was that the translation of Shaegh-var is more readable and should be read for the first time, but the translation of Hosseini is more accurate and resolves many of the knots that exist in the first translation, although the Persian language of the translation is not very desirable, but of course it is excellent compared to other works of Saleh Hosseini.

In general, my recommendation for Faulkner reading to dear friends is that first read the collection of stories "Go Down, Moses" with the translation of Najaf Deriabandari, then read the novel "As I Lay Dying" again with the translation of Najaf, which has a more straightforward story compared to other works of Faulkner, then read "The Sound and the Fury" with the translation of Shaegh-var and then with the translation of Saleh Hosseini. After that, it doesn't matter which one of Faulkner's masterpieces you read, a writer that many consider to be the greatest writer of the 20th century.

For the comparison of the two translations, the first paragraph of the second chapter, which I think is also the best chapter of the book, is presented below.

Translation of Shaegh-var:

When the shadow of the window fell on the curtains, it was between seven and eight o'clock and I was bound to time again and I could hear the sound of the clock. This clock was my grandfather's and when my father gave it to me, he said: Quentin, I give you this graveyard of deeds and hopes. It is fitting that you use it for the acquisition of the petty trade of humanity in such a punishing way that it bleeds as much with the pain of your personal needs as it did with the pain of your father's or your grandfather's needs. I give you this not so that you will remember time, but so that you can sometimes forget it for a moment and not spend all your breath on conquering it. Because no battle is ever won, he said. It doesn't even engage. The battlefield only exposes the folly and mediocrity of man and victory is the dream of philosophers and fools.

Translation of Saleh Hosseini:

The shadow of the window was found on the curtains and it was between seven and eight o'clock and at that time I was again in time and I could hear the sound of the clock. The clock was my grandfather's and

the day that our father gave it to me, he said: Quentin, I give you the grave of hopes and desires; what makes your heart bleed in a bloody way is that using it will lead you to the futile results of human beings and you will see that, just as it does not come with the personal needs of him or his father, it does not come with your personal needs in the same way. I give you this not so that you will remember time, but so that you can sometimes forget a moment that has passed and not put all your grief and sorrow on conquering it. Because no battle leads to victory, he said. No battle is even engaged. The battlefield only reveals the stupidity and mediocrity of man, and victory is the plaything of philosophers and fools.

**The Incubus of Time**

“Sometimes by dint of repeating it I managed to fall asleep until after the honeysuckle got mixed up in it all and the whole thing came to symbolize the night and uneasiness and it seemed to me that I was lying there not asleep and not awake looking toward the back of a long gray hall of penumbra where all concrete objects had become shadowy and paradoxical and all that I had done was shadow and all that I had felt and suffered was shadow and they assumed grotesque and perverse and mocking and irrelevant shapes that were consistent with themselves in the denial of the meaning that they should have affirmed thinking that I was not I who was not who was not who.”

Shadow, “shadow” is the key word of this book by Faulkner, which I have read twice in a row, and it represents the identity of the characters in the evolution of the narrative. Their identity is anxiously doubtful: as has been written, the characters in this novel do not know themselves and can never be the same person; for this reason, they struggle to live integrated into society, and yet they give life to an epic of voices that pursue and intertwine, where past and present, truth and lie, tragedy and comedy coexist. “Life's but a walking shadow,” from Shakespeare's Macbeth. The text, constructed on the technique of the stream of consciousness, with a debt to Joyce, tells the story of the fall of a family of the decadent aristocracy of the American South, between financial ruin and moral dissolution, in the land of the defeated after the Civil War. Religious faith loses its concreteness and affective ties are swept away by social misfortune. The narrative presents events in a non-linear way, introducing chronological jumps and sudden changes in perspective. The expressionistic use of language and the alternation of narrative registers are characteristic of a form recognized as belonging to modernism, whose fundamental quality is complexity, in a dark, rich, and abundant linguistic material, as Emilio Tadini writes well in the preface, speaking of the fear of not being able to know and not being able to represent. And from here come the movement, the experiment, the nomination, the correspondences, the hyperbole. The poetic and evocative words of explorations in the interiority, in the landscapes of the soul, are proof of that technical complexity and non-metaphorical obscurity: “Where the shadow of the bridge fell I could look very far down, but not to the bottom. When you leave a leaf in the water for a long time after a while the fabric goes away and the delicate fibers remain swaying with the same slowness as the movements that are made in sleep. They are not touched, even though before they formed a tangle, even though before they were very close to the veins.”

The story of Candace, observed by each of her three brothers, highlights the enigmatic and multiple nature of human reality. The Compson brothers are violent and complex creatures, contradictory and dynamic, between redemption, compassion, guilt, and punishment. The novel form is pushed beyond its extreme boundaries, within its own limits, between body and eternity: it is the journey of individuals who struggle in a tragic and inevitable destiny. Faulkner describes and narrates with powerful introspection the conflict between reckless passion and pitiless cynicism, between the vocation for harmony and the catastrophic inclination: responsible for the common sin, united in a hell that protects, excluding others, in the black and cursed heart of the deep and reactionary South, the defeated and biblical South, in an identity crisis. “The Sound and the Fury” is a mythological fable set in an imaginary Yoknapatawpha County, in Jefferson, Mississippi, where a lost and repudiated woman defines the other characters in the daily choice between pain and nothingness, while the denied impulses of desire are a condemnation to be paid, an original wound: the tragic side of existence denotes faith in the irreducible core of human dignity and hope, highlighting the sacrifice and resistance necessary to reach depth of vision and full awareness. The Faulknerian characters ask themselves why they are in the world and mysteriously love death, thus sinking into a metaphysical and ineffable life experience, beyond feelings. They are irregular, tormented, irremediably damned characters, with a discomfort and a despair that lead them to disaster when they cannot avoid it or miss it. They are marked in the flesh and live the curse of blood, they coexist with hereditary illness and madness and with the obsession for lost purity and innocence; shaken by the breakdown of morality and ethical tradition, they clash in the fanaticism of honor and shame, they repel each other in the inevitable attraction to the origin, and they confront each other in participating in the decline of a world of values overcome and defeated, where only the “pietas” of the weakest remains: within them, it seems that even the person and the voice of Faulkner disappear; in some way, they are themselves illusions, projections, hallucinations, ghosts or indeed “shadows.”

“I don't give it to you so that you can remember the time, but so that sometimes you can forget it for a moment and not waste all your breath in the attempt to overcome it. Because, he said, battles are never won. They are not even fought. Man discovers, on the field, only his folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”

Rage and Fury

Note: Since I really loved this book and I want to review this writing every time so that the whole book comes alive for me, at the end of the writing I will write a summary of all the events of the book and there will be spoilers. So please, if you haven't read the book and are sensitive, don't read until that part. (Now it seems like someone is reading my writings

What can be said about this novel that hasn't been said before? Faulkner is pure narrative vanguard. With this work, Faulkner inaugurates contemporary novel. The experimentation with form and language is of an incomparable mastery. The first two parts are almost incomprehensible (on purpose), because they are from the perspective of Benjamin, the mentally disabled son of the Compson family. So, all we read is a constant hubbub of voices and words that recreate that confused and disordered world that Benjamin perceives. Little by little, the panorama becomes clearer and we understand the story of this family (and that of their black servants) that is gradually falling apart, although it is only in the final appendix that we find out everything. It's normal. Faulkner uses dialogues, changes of voice, points of view, ellipses and transitions never before seen in the literature of that time. All these resources he has invented, and a careful reading is needed not to get lost, since he does not precisely make transitions between one thing and another, but integrates them organically. And that's why it's not until the end that we finish weaving the complete plot (and the past and future of it that is not narrated in the previous parts) of the Compson family, the alcoholic patriarch who sells the meadow of his son Benjamin so that his other son Quentin can study at Harvard and his daughter Candace can get married... The only son he bets on is Jason ("the only sane one"), and in the middle, the mother, who always seems to be sick and unable to cope with her children, especially with Benjamin, who is taken care of by the black servants, especially the dedicated Dilsey and Luster. But all this is intertwined with stories of the past and future, in constant temporal breaks, and with characters who have the same name since some are descendants of others (as is the case of Quentin, the daughter of Candace, who is named like her uncle). The narration is circular and closes with another point of view of what is narrated at the beginning (this, before the explanatory appendix of the characters). In short, an essential novel to read that deserves (and almost requires) rereading while reading it, because its multiple layers are not only of structure and form, but also of depth, that depth so well intertwined thanks to the fine and unique use that Faulkner makes of language. The innovative thing about the author is not precisely the technique of the interior monologue, which he uses but in a very different way: what he does rather is to represent the interior vision of the exterior, that is, what each character sees/feels/hears/thinks while life unfolds, which is much more than an interior thought, it is an entire structure of apprehension of reality translated into words.

I didn't enjoy this as much as I had anticipated. I was in awe of the depictions of thought through language and experienced some of the futile anguish of those trapped in their family history. I managed to glean something from the story, seeing it as a sort of microcosm of the South's struggle to overcome racism, sexism, and classism at the dawn of modernity between the two world wars. I had long ago experienced Faulkner's storytelling prowess with short stories like "Go Down Moses" and recently was deeply moved and amazed by the radical language and mind-states in "Absalom Absalom!". However, this one didn't touch my emotions or transport me with mental revelations nearly as effectively. The lessons about any transformation of Southern consciousness remain somewhat unclear to me.

We are presented here with a four-part harmony of an aristocratic family in decline in the 1920s in rural Mississippi. We soar and careen through the minds of three male siblings of the Compson family and then are liberated into the perspectives of others such as their servants. I initially struggled with the fragmented yet fascinating perspective of Benjy, a 33-year-old with the mind of a five-year-old, his simple pleasures, vivid sensations, warping of time, and frequent frustrations that lead to his bellowing. Next, we explore the world of Quentin, a disengaged student at Harvard who is slipping into madness and despair. I adored the language of his fragmented form and the dark secrets that bubble up in his memories. Then comes Jason, an angry racist and misogynist who clings to an identity as gentry in his reduced state of helping to manage a hardware store, tending to the remnants of the family plantation, his dotty and ill mother, and playing the stock market with any funds he can hide or squirrel away. Finally, we get the muted views of the black help, who are along for the ride with this family, their status and outlook little different from that of slaves.

So much of the concerns of the three siblings are related to their emotions and memories of Caddy, the sister who escapes into wild teenage behavior and promiscuity. If you're like me, you'll be frustrated with only getting pieces of reflected knowledge of her mind and life, as she is the one whose rebellion seems most likely to break the patterns of futility. She is the only one who truly cares about Benjy, and his love for her permeates his world, forever tied to a childhood memory that "she smells like trees". Quentin was Caddy's close companion throughout childhood, but he can't get over the loss of her maiden innocence or his failure to defend her honor against the older cad, Dalton James, who takes advantage of her. He's all twisted up with his own incestuous feelings for her. In the case of Jason, he is defeated in his attempts to curb her with more violent controls and ends up in the same situation later on when her daughter comes into the family's care at the farm.

The high point for me was the prose that portrays Quentin's thinking and the metaphors behind them. Like his concern for being trapped by time and his attempt to escape it by removing the hands from his watch, only to be defeated by church bells. I loved his constant attention to shadows as another dimension of reality or a distorted illusion like those in Plato's cave. And his being haunted by the smell of honeysuckle, which is bound up with his early emerging lusts for Caddy. If the plot and story elements I've shared don't seem sufficient to pursue this book, just see if these samples of writing change your mind. Here is Quentin's memory of tracking her down in the woods after he hears her slip out one night:

I ran down the hill in that vacuum of crickets like a breath travelling across a mirror she was lying in the water her head in the sand spit the water flowing about her hips there was a little more light in the water her skirt half saturated flopped along her flanks to the waters motion in easy ripples going nowhere renewed themselves of their own movement I stood on the bank I could smell honeysuckle on the water gap the air seemed to drizzle with honeysuckle and with the rasping of crickets a substance you could feel on the flesh.

Caddy don't Caddy.
it wont do any good don't you know it wont let me go.
the honeysuckle drizzled and drizzled I could hear the crickets watching us in a circle she moved back went around me on toward the trees.
you go on back to the house you neednt come.
I went on.

why don't you go on back to the house.
damn that honeysuckle.

Here Quentin's despair is so profound that he imagines drowning himself with irons in his pockets, the name of Caddy's violator tolling like a bell in his mind:

If things just finished themselves. Nobody else there but her and me. If we could have just done something so dreadful that they would have fled hell except us. I have committed incest I said Father it was I it was not Dalton James. And when he put Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. When he put the pistol in my hand I didn't. That's why I didn't. He would be there and she would and I would. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. If we could have just dome something so dreadful and Father said That's sad too people cannot do anything that dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful they cannot do anything very dreadful at all they cannot even remember tomorrow what seemed dreadful today and I said, You can shirk all things and he said, Ah can you. And I will look down and see my murmuring bones and the deep water like wind, like a roof of wind, and after a long time they cannot distinguish even bones upon the lonely and inviolate sand. Until on the Day when he says Rise only the flat-iron would come floating up. It's not when you realize that nothing can help you—religion, pride, anything—it's when you realize you don't need any aid. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames.

I have sympathy for those who feel that Faulkner did literature a disservice by making his writing so obscure that you almost need a college course to figure it out (e.g. see Jason Pettus' review). Is all this family drama a tragedy on the order of MacBeth, as implied by the title? Or is it a case of a family once riding high now getting their just deserts? I would have felt the tragedy more if there was a character struggling to remove blood that can't be washed off. The whole issue of slavery and finding a worthy path for the South after the Civil War doesn't play out as explicitly in this story as it did for the earlier Compsons featured in "Absalom Absalom!". Somewhere out there, some scholars must have parsed the elements of early existentialism in Faulkner's connection to Shakespeare's lines:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

This masterpiece is truly a classic, a work that I have always desired to read.

And now, here I am once again in the heart of America!

At the beginning, it presents an intricate monument, with rough writing and an upset chronology. There are characters sharing the same first name! It tells the story of a bereaved family, a disabled son, and a son who is in love with his sister. There is also a distraught mother and a father who passed away due to alcoholism.

Here, we have a family full of secrets, servants, and mad humanity.

It was indeed a shocking reading experience that left a deep impression on me.

The complex web of relationships and the dark secrets within the family made it a captivating and thought-provoking piece of literature.

I couldn't help but be drawn into the story and explore the hidden depths of each character.

This classic truly lives up to its reputation and has become one of my favorite reads.

Makes you feel disoriented and limp, this is an extremely dark description. It is very similar to the atmosphere presented in "The Discomfort Of Evening". The pacing in this narrative laps between the fast and the very slow in the day-to-day life of the Compson family. The rapid moments might be filled with intense emotions or sudden events that jolt the reader, while the slow parts could be dedicated to detailed descriptions of the family's inner turmoil, their relationships, and the overall sense of desolation that pervades their lives. This contrast in pacing adds to the overall sense of unease and disorientation, making the reader feel as if they are adrift in the same dark and confusing world as the Compson family.

This is an extremely fascinating and challenging book. It is marked not only by the darkness of its vision but also by a certain strain of wilful obscurantism in the way it is told. Faulkner's concept of a family tragedy is far from subtle. This pastoral scene of the gallant South encompasses idiocy, castration, incest, racism, suicide, and alcoholism. However, even discerning this much requires a rather intense engagement with the book. As Faulkner himself told his publisher, ‘It's a real son-of-a-bitch.’

The main reason for this lies in the opening section, which is narrated by a thirty-three-year-old man who is supposed, in the thinking of the 1920s, to have a mental age of about two. In Benjy's world, there is little cause and effect. Things simply happen, other things follow, lights and colours move, and time shifts dizzyingly as a smell or a name takes him back through the various traumatic experiences of his life. Thus, a single double-page of the novel can involve stories occurring in four or five different time periods.

The Folio Society edition that I read attempts to make sense of this by colour-coding the text. This was something Faulkner desired to do at the time, but printing technology did not then permit it. It creates a very fancy reading experience, but I'm not entirely sure how much it truly helps in understanding what is going on. Without it, I would have only vaguely distinguished between ‘present-ish’ and ‘some time in the past’. Now, however, I feel compelled to keep straight all fourteen different time-levels that the editors have identified.

Sometimes Faulkner uses italics to indicate a transition between times, but not always. For example, in the following ‘exchange’: “I skeered I going to holler.” T. P. said. “Git on the box and see is they started.” “They haven't started because the band hasn't come yet.” Caddy said. Here, the first line takes place around 1910, when Benjy's sister Caddy is about to get married, and the second line is approximately ten years earlier, during their grandmother's funeral. The jump is apparently triggered by the similarity in waiting for some significant event to occur. I had to stop reading this in bed at night because I simply couldn't follow the narrative. And it doesn't help that there are two characters with the same name and one other whose name was changed at some point, all of which seems unnecessarily complicated.

But like all great books – and this is undoubtedly a great book – The Sound and the Fury teaches you how to read it. After a while, you just let it wash over you and swim contentedly through a confusion of times and impressions. (The interest in time led me to wonder if Faulkner was consciously writing after Proust, but as far as I can tell, this does not seem to have been a major influence on him.)

Once we progress to the subsequent two sections, narrated in turn by Benjy's two brothers, things become a little easier. The stream of consciousness can still seem a bit opaque at times, but it at least has a certain coherence of focus and time, which makes the moments of opacity more easily decipherable within the context.

What is the point of all this obscurity and prevarication? I believe it is to show the way people's minds circle around things they are unable or unwilling to think about directly. In the case of the Compson family, this all revolves around the sister, Caddy, with whom all of the brothers are obsessed. She is simultaneously a source of comfort, a locus of sexual fascination, and a repository of the family's honour.

In a key early scene of the book, Benjy remembers her climbing a tree to peer through a window while the brothers wait at the bottom, looking up at her dress and her muddy drawers, dirty from playing in the stream. This is a kind of Primal Scene for all of them, capturing a potent mix, in their minds or Faulkner's, between transgression, female sexuality, and uncleanness.

This is doubtless an inheritance from their misanthropic father (who speaks of women as a ‘Delicate equilibrium of periodical filth between two moons balanced’). Nowadays, one is torn between admiration for how well Faulkner captures these attitudes and, on the other hand, a kind of baffled frustration that so much anxiety was occasioned by so little. She is just an ordinary girl growing up, going through puberty, and having the weight of her family's issues dumped squarely on her shoulders.

And the only way out, according to the pessimism of Mr Compson senior, is death. Man is merely ‘A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire’.

The prose of the novel perhaps suggests another way. After the first-person sections from the three Compson brothers, the final section is told in the third person. Faulkner never allows Caddy to speak for herself; we only see her through the eyes of others. The last of these is through the eyes of Faulkner himself, who finally abandons stream-of-consciousness to write directly as an impersonal narrator.

It's a monstrous novel that you almost have to study as you read it, and it's rather humourless compared to the contemporary modernism of Joyce. However, I found it fascinating, despite the effort required. Faulkner was once asked if he had any advice for readers who still couldn't understand it even after reading it two or three times. Yes, he said, he did: ‘Read it a fourth time.’ Cheeky bastard.

This Monster of a Book is equally profound and puzzling.

It exists somewhere between naked consciousness and brutal incomprehension. The novel is highly cerebral, to say the least.

The events that occur during one Easter weekend at the end of the roaring 20's are sliced off at emotional markers and then blended with events from the sad, sad past.

Beginning the labyrinth with Benjy's POV is like the set of rules proposed by the mad Faulkner. He not only asks but DEMANDS that one put everything aside to partake in the Southern Gothic, the drama involved in the lives of the members of a doomed clan.

There are occasional dips into 3 distinct psyches, and it is fascinating to see how random or planned the trajectory of each one's personal destiny becomes.

This is a reverse MRS. DALLOWAY. While that one treats one day as an emblem for the titular character and the different characters represent a whole, the Compsons are made from the same source, yet time is mostly inconsequential as there are enormous spans of time in which the protagonists linger and deep gaps where the audience is left to wonder.

The whole experience is one of near madness as the SOUND is described at full length by several sources of consciousness, while the FURY is all the reader's own in piecing together all the strands.

Give Faulkner half your month! It took a Professor that long to make a chart of the more than dozen story-lines making up this monolith of the fierce (and post-Civil War) south.

Here are a few spoiler-free things I wish someone had told me about this book.

First of all, Benjy is perhaps somewhere on the autism spectrum. However, Faulkner isn't a medically specific writer. Benjy thinks in a different way that is more accurately diagnosed as "modernism" rather than in a scientific sense. He has no concept of time. He doesn't understand that some things happened before and others happen now. For him, it all occurs in the present. Faulkner sometimes switches to italics to indicate a time switch, but not always, which can be quite frustrating.

Luster only appears in the present, in 1928, when Benjy is 33.

If you find yourself confused about how Quentin switched genders, there are actually two Quentins. One is Benjy's brother in the past sections, and the other is Caddy's daughter in the present sections. This really confused me for most of this section.

Similarly, there are two Jasons: Benjy's dad and his older brother.

Also, Benjy's name used to be Maury, and their uncle is still named Maury.

While there may be valid literary reasons for these overlapping names, the main reason seems to be that Faulkner is a bit of a difficult writer.

Each of the four sections has a different narrator. The next section (Quentin) will be slightly easier to follow, and the last two (Jason and, well, God) are more or less straightforward. I think it's worth persevering through the beginning, but I also understand those who say it's not worth it at all and that the central message of Faulkner's work is simply "I'm a difficult writer."

Faulkner's 'The Sound and the Fury' is a complex and multi-faceted novel that tells the story of a family's decline from the perspectives of three of its members.

When I first began reading this supposed masterpiece, I was initially enthralled by the unique experience of seeing the world through the eyes of a mentally challenged character. However, as I progressed through the subsequent chapters, told by a sane person and others, I found the story to be increasingly ambiguous and incomplete.

I read the book twice in succession, hoping to uncover hidden meanings and nuances that I might have missed on my first reading. I even consulted SparkNotes, but was disappointed to find that they too had difficulty understanding certain aspects of the novel.

To be honest, I felt that the novel was overly complicated for what was essentially a not-so-complicated story line. There are other literary greats, such as Dostoevsky and Kafka, who were able to convey their complex ideas in a simple and lucid manner.

I understand that some works may be difficult to understand due to their deep and subjective content, but I fail to see why this particular novel had to be deliberately made so impenetrable.

Despite my reservations, I do recognize the craftsmanship that went into writing this novel. The author clearly struggled to piece together such a disjointed narrative.

Overall, I gave this novel a rating of 2.5 stars out of 5. However, I remain open to the possibility that I may have failed to fully appreciate its greatness due to my own incompetence or lack of refinement. I look forward to reading Faulkner's other works, such as 'As I Lay Dying' and 'Absalom Absalom', in the hope that I will gain a better understanding and appreciation of his writing.

-gautam

Jefferson, Mississippi 1910 - 1928. This is a profound story of an American family's tragic decline in economic and social status. The Compson family, once prosperous after the Civil War, faced a series of disasters. Alcoholism plagued Mr. Compson, while Mrs. Caroline Compson suffered from hypochondria. The eldest son Quentin committed suicide, the only daughter Candance or Caddy was promiscuous, the second son Jason was greedy, and the youngest son Maury, Benjamin or Benjy was an idiot. Eventually, the family was torn apart by death and separation.

This is by far the hardest book I have read this year. The story is presented in four chapters, each with its own narrator and not arranged chronologically.

Chapter 1 is told by the 33-year-old retarded Benjy on April 7, 1928. His narration, mainly in the stream-of-consciousness style, is difficult to follow as it jumps randomly based on his thoughts. Fortunately, my second-hand edition has the dates added by the previous owner, which helps clarify when certain italicized phrases or sentences occur.

Chapter 2 is from the perspective of 38-year-old Quentin on June 2, 1910, when he was a 20-year-old Harvard student. His narrative starts off plain but becomes increasingly chaotic as Caddy's pregnancy drives him crazy and ultimately leads to his suicide. I had to read this part extremely slowly to understand, which caused physical discomfort.

Chapter 3 is the only linear and straightforward narrative, told by the second son and mother's favorite, Jason on Good Friday, April 8, 1928, the day after Benjy's chapter. Jason took over what was left of the family after Quentin's suicide, Mr. Compson's death, and Caddy's departure.

Chapter 4 is that of Dilsey, the black mayordoma of the family. It is the only part without first-person narration and the only part without "insanity." Dilsey is not only sane but also has a strong faith and is guided by her values.

There is so much to say about this book, especially regarding its writing style. It is unique and unlike anything I've seen before. It is darker than, for example, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The use of stream-of-consciousness is highly effective, allowing the reader to piece together the fragmented and convoluted narrations and understand the plot. William Faulkner is truly a brilliant writer, with a distinct voice and an unbeatable style that will forever be his own.