To read this novel, one should read the translator's preface which explains Faulkner's style in this novel.

Honor and fathers, this is what Faulkner focused on in his novel about a family in the American South where the history of this family is cotton planting and the use of slaves.

The impact of events on the people of the South after the liberation of the slaves and the invasion of the North in more than one way.

The decline of this family and the honor and fathers they are proud of despite the change in their way of life and circumstances.

A small town where there are no secrets for any family. Even the family feels ashamed of having a son with special needs. And the brother's attachment to his sister who he didn't believe loved a man and who lost her virginity and gave birth out of wedlock and didn't even tell them who the father was.

The change of circumstances and the sale of land to be able to afford the necessary means of life and the hatred among the sons and the exploitation of the situation.

It's good.

Somehow I managed to obtain a degree in English Lit without ever having read Faulkner. This was the very first book of his that I delved into, and I simply cannot praise it enough. This book truly haunts you. Here's the deal. You know that sensation you experience when you hear a song or catch a glimpse of a face that triggers a hazy memory? That memory could have been a dream, or perhaps something you witnessed in a movie. It might very well have been something that never actually occurred to you, but was rather a fantasy you had years ago. Maybe there's even a physical response? There is a connection, but darn it if you can precisely identify it. Still, it占据你的脑海整整一个下午，并引发一系列你原本可能不会有的思绪。那很好，对吧？当然。这就是你从这本书中所获得的。你试图去找到那种联系。另一位评论家说，读《喧哗与骚动》就像是试图用缺失了50%的拼图块来拼一幅拼图。我理解这个观点，但我不知道这是否完全正确。我认为并没有任何缺失的拼图块。你只是必须改变你对完成后的拼图会是什么样子的预期。

我逐渐明白了人们所说的“福克纳不仅仅是在记录南方的衰落”这句话的含义。我认为这里更重要的主题与重建后时代/世纪之交的南方关系不大，而更多地与对时间和历史与人类/家庭经历相关的更广泛的审视有关。这本书的展开方式与我所读过的任何书都不同。在最初的70 - 100页里，你会有点迷失。我们将时间视为线性过程的理解会使你对这本书第一部分的体验感到困惑。本吉的叙述确实很难理解，但当这本书读完后，他的叙述是最令人难忘的，也许也是最重要的。总的来说，这本书分为四个部分，有四个不同的视角。我们通过本吉看到过去、现在和未来存在于一个平面上，而不是一条线上；昆汀完全无法接受时间的流逝，并且对过去充满渴望（一个他不一定身处其中的过去）；杰森只活在当下，痴迷于一种最新的存在方式；最后是迪尔西，她似乎是这个家庭中唯一有能力将过去吸收为当下一部分的成员，并且毫无畏惧地生活在未来。这个主题是通过风格来探索的。这本书充满了没有开头或结尾的句子，一些对话没有表明说话者是谁，而且整个过程中标点符号不完全错误，但肯定也不正确。大量的闪回、视角的转变，而且常常是连续好几页几乎没有段落分隔。通过福克纳对语言的实验，每个角色对时间的感知都得以展现。这就像是在读一个梦。其理念是将所有这些时刻、图像和破碎的对话片段拼凑在一起，以便触及我之前所说的那种感觉的核心。“这是从哪里来的？我为什么会想到这个？我什么时候才能把它拼凑起来并弄清楚？”你可能无法到达那里，但尝试一下是令人鼓舞的。

5星，A +，竖起大拇指……所有那些赞誉。读这本书吧。

In the first paragraph, Faulkner throws us into the mind of the "mentally handicapped" Benjy. Benjy cannot speak, understand, or explain. He only looks and observes, confused. Sometimes he makes a sound, screams, or cries. It is a handicapped mind. Our minds are not like that. We can understand and try to make sense. We can piece together what has happened, follow the leaps in time, and construct the story. We know this. We try to access the story. The important thing is the story. We think that within the story, Benjy can also be understood. Through events, through others, through other connections... but no.

No, because when we move on to the second part and enter Quentin's mind, Faulkner also throws in our faces the difficulty of understanding a non-handicapped mind. Quentin's has a darkness, an un-reachable depth that even he himself cannot access. We still try to construct the story, even with the gaps. We find connections with the first part, make discoveries through details. As we progress like this, the puzzle will surely be completed and solved in the end. We know such stories well as thoughtful readers.

In the third part, Faulkner gives us what we want with the narrator Jason. Jason's language is the language of the story that we know, and he clearly conveys his own character. He narrates quickly, fluently, and understandably and finishes his part. The story has been solved now. In the fourth part, with the narrator "from the outside", the final awaits us. The difficult book has become easier... but just as the final begins to be determined, a force, a resistance seems to arise. This resistance calls us back before finishing the book.

How important is the story?... Why hasn't this story been told only like in the last two parts? We can now quickly give the answer. In fact, Faulkner has done what he will do in the first two parts. He has even done it by throwing us into the mind of a handicapped person in the first part. Can we understand everything? What can we get from a story that is clear and understandable?.. It is not the story that challenges us in the first part, but Benjy's inability to understand the story - his story. In the second part, it is our inability to solve Quentin, the impossibility of Quentin explaining himself. The desire to understand everything is our deficiency. Not understanding - not being able to explain, not understanding the incomprehensibility - the inexpressibility. The problem is that everyone has a different story within the story. Faulkner is the best teller of this problem.

William Faulkner is undoubtedly one of the most intelligent and sensitive writers in history. What astonishes me is that he firmly believed that the readers who read his works should also be intelligent and sensitive. This belief, in a way, made it possible for Faulkner's books to reach their deserved place. There is a complicity that is neither offered nor requested, but is forged from the very first page when the reader reads and reads. First with hope, then with doubt that turns into restlessness, and then a fervent desire to keep reading. The reader may not understand what is read, but feels it. The reader senses and intuits the helplessness of Benji, the determination of Cady, the courage of Dilsey, the misfortune of the father, the weakness of the mother, the desolation of Quentin, the selfishness of Jason, and the enigma of little Quentin.

The book begins with the narration of Benjamin Compson. He loves his sister Cady, the meadow that belongs to his family, and the fire. Benji is a mentally handicapped person, and Faulkner is able to reflect Benji in his narration. He tells us what he sees, but also what he remembers, but above all the smells and sounds. He knows that his sister smells of plants, that there are noises that irritate him and bad people. He knows that the black woman Dilsey protects him, but there are things that we do not understand or connect, yet somehow Benji transmits his pain to us, the pain of loss that overwhelms him. Of his three favorite things, he will lose two.

Quentin Compson, the eldest son, takes over the narration in the second part, and the tone changes radically. However, the narration does not become clearer because of this, due to Quentin's mental state. Overwhelmed by his inner misfortune, condemned by an impossible love, condemned for being the last hope of a long line of exceptional Compsons, tormented by his fears, his sense of honor and duty, but at the same time lost and attracted towards a scheduled end. This makes what is read sometimes disjointed, full of memories, retrospectives, the journey he makes towards a gallows that we intuit but are not sure of, a walk that becomes a despicable suspicion. We do not know if at some point we are imagining, going crazy or simply lost in the many mazes that exist within Quentin's tortured mind.

The last part is narrated by Jason, the brother of the previous two. He is the favorite of a mother diminished by her origin, who sees in her son Jason a more ordinary and normal existence, as if the Compson blood had not appeared in him. In this part, the veil is lifted and we can see all the misery, the mistakes, the decadence and the final stretch of a dynasty that once was but will never be again. Through Jason's traps, meanness and acts, we discover the remains of the Compsons who are leaving, fading away, and all that will remain is this land as proof that they existed.

There is a great deal of poetry, lyricism, force and genius in this book. Each part is moving, torturous, and interesting.

This book would only be recommended to more demanding readers. It is not the kind of book that you can simply spend a pleasant hour with. However, it is not as difficult as it is said to be. The essential prerequisite... is the prologue. In no case can you read it before understanding the prologue.

It is not a novel that is distinguished by its plot, and it would be wrong to judge it from this perspective. At first, it is divided into four parts. In the first three, the author narrates in the first person as a different character each time. The three characters are three brothers: a thirty-year-old with a congenital mental retardation, a young and immature self-taught, and a mature and logical one.

It is impressive how he manages technically to connect three very different narratives among them, as if it were another author. The whole greatness of the book lies in how vivid the characters are. They are heroes that no one would have as a prototype. They are heroes with different flaws, yet they win your sympathy.

This first reading was accompanied by many backtrackings to the prologue. I think that with a second reading, I will enjoy it more and appreciate it more, although I cannot rate it lower, recognizing in the person of Faulkner an extremely talented author, for what he dared and managed to do so harmoniously.

In 1970, I was truly fascinated by Quentin. Quentin, the soul-scarred veteran of stress in this book, was attempting to connect the dots in the chaotic and perplexing mess of his life. However, in this postmodern quagmire, the dots seemed to have no order or meaning.

As T. S. Eliot wrote in "The Waste Land" after his own breakdown, "I can connect nothing with nothing." I too had once believed that I could somehow make sense of the senseless in my bipolar brain. I had tried to prove this in 1969, but it led to my hospitalization.

The following fall, I was cautious about Quentin's dilemma.

Thankfully, my sister made a wise choice in the summer of 1970. As our family traveled to San Francisco to meet my mom after her international librarians' conference, my sister declined to give in to the same depressive mindset. She convinced me to focus on the positive, and during that carefree car ride, my deep depression began to lift.

I became happy, although I was still connecting the wrong dots. Her joy was the catalyst for my recovery and the beginning of a highly successful bureaucratic career that started the following year, after I graduated from college.

But Quentin remained a mystery to me during that fall as I read this book in the "purple passion pit" of the college Douglas Library.

Nevertheless, I could relate to his struggles on many levels. I had been there and done that!

"The Sound and the Fury" showed me that my recovery was an ongoing process, but I was determined to win the battle.

Quentin is like Mary Ventura in Sylvia Plath's understated short story masterpiece, as they both clearly saw that they had nothing left to live for.

This was the very thing that my sister, the previous summer, and my mom, throughout her short life with me, had strenuously taught me to avoid at all costs.

So in 1970, I wisely took Quentin's quandary with a grain of salt and have since fought my battles with newfound vigor.

Images... I see them. They are beautiful, but I am left wondering.

The images seem to hold a mystery. There goes someone. What is she doing? Her actions are enigmatic.

Those images, what do they mean? They dance before my eyes, taunting me with their ambiguity.

There she goes again, disappearing into the unknown.

And then, as if you weren't confused enough, in the second section of The Sound and the Fury, the narration is taken over by Quentin. He is a quick-witted, yet nearly no more reliable a narrator than before.

He is the somewhat confused but chivalrous Harvard-educated brother, who clings to Southern ideals. His passion for upholding his beloved sister's virtue may be the very thing that undoes it.

Just as you feel you're getting your bearings, we're off again!

Jason, the family breadwinner, is no-nonsense and unhappy. For him, money comes before ideals. It's his way or the highway.

Aside from the initially confusing addition of "Miss Quentin," this section, as bleak and tense as it is, is the easiest to follow.

But Faulkner switches it up again.

Dilsey, the head of the black servants, is a strong counterpoint to the decaying white folks she works for.

While their way of life in late 1800s/early 1900s Mississippi falls apart, she is rock solid.

Through her voice, in this final section, we see the story from another perspective, filling in more pieces of this complicated tale.

William Faulkner is a shapeshifting devil of a writer. His pen creates impenetrable morasses of language and plot.

Whether you ever emerge from his labyrinthine swamp or not is almost entirely up to you.

Few lifelines will be found, and you may easily miss one amid an impossibly long description drenched in the Southern artist's canvass, painted lavishly with molasses and sweat.

This is Faulkner at his finest. To craft a tale told four times over from disparate sources, one nearly impossible to follow, and expect to keep the reader rooted to the page is an incredible feat.

By the end, you're sure you've just witnessed black magic.

"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."

William Shakespeare
Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5

When Macbeth learns of the death of his wife, he utters the above lines with a wail, which can be a clue to the meaning of "The Sound and the Fury," a novel by William Faulkner.

Undoubtedly, Faulkner plays with the idea that "life is but a walking shadow." The word "shadow" constantly appears throughout the section related to "Quentin," and also sometimes catches the eye in other parts of the novel.

This inner perception that life is a shadow has also been used by Faulkner to imply that the activities of modern humans, in comparison to the great deeds of the men of the past, are only a shadow, and modern humans are only a shadow of an existence that has been created and given in a defective way and, as a result, is unable to deal with the problems of modern life. Humans are doomed to self-destruction, just like Quentin, and when they do this, they see their shadow rising from the water beneath their feet. A human who does not kill himself is either a materialistic person like "Jason" who values nothing but money, or a "fool" like "Benjy" who can see nothing but the shadow of life.

If life is only "a tale told by an idiot," then it is appropriate that the first part of the story is told from the perspective of Benjy, who is three years behind, because the story that Faulkner tells is indeed full of various kinds of anger and fury.

Source:
https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literatur...

I have finally finished reading this book and I liked it and would recommend it to you. However, the main theme of the book seemed quite ordinary to me. It was more the form of the story and its style that appealed to me. Of course, I should also mention that the first time I read this book, I didn't like it at all, but the second time it was much more understandable and interesting.

Faulkner tells the story of a disintegrating American family in the form of a stream of consciousness. The Compson family! They live with their servant Dilsey. The Compson family has four children named Caddy (Candace), Quentin, Jason, and Benjamin. The first chapter is told from the perspective of Benjy, who is mentally challenged. The second chapter is told from the perspective of Quentin, who is a student at Harvard University, and I really liked this chapter related to Quentin. Someone who has a strong affection for his sister because of the problems that have come up for her, and the guilt and those influential dialogues. The third chapter is told from the perspective of Jason, who has problems with everyone from his mother to his brothers and sisters and servants, and is very irritable. His sense of entitlement and that he has the right to interfere in everyone's life and give his opinion was very annoying and turned into a negative personality in this story. The last chapter is also told from the perspective of the family's father, who Quentin believes will eventually die from excessive drinking, and he didn't have a very colorful role in terms of dialogue, and the mother of the family, who is Caroline, is sick and has an extra sense of being in the house... The children of Dilsey, the black servant of the house, are also Frony, Versh, and T. P., each of whom has certain duties in the house. The first chapter is very tiring and annoying, but actually the book gets better from the second chapter onwards and is worth reading. The book was compared to "The Sound and the Fury" (people got the famous idea of "the sound and the fury" from this book). In my opinion, "The Sound and the Fury" didn't have as many time jumps and was much more coherent.

What in the world did I just read?

My book club chose “The Sound and the Fury” by William Faulkner. After flipping through 50 pages, I was convinced that I needed an interpreter. So, off I went to Spark Notes.

The first two-thirds of the novel is written in the stream of consciousness style. The first third is narrated by a man with an intellectual disability. He has no sense of time. All his memories seem to exist in the present, even when he is reminiscing about the past. Faulkner further confounds the reader with the character names. There are two Quintins and two Jasons.

I don't understand why great literature requires interpretation. But that's my major gripe with literature. I digress. The book is divided into four sections. The first three sections are narrated by the Compson sons, and the last section is told by a third-person omniscient narrator. The first two sections were a struggle to read because both sons had mental issues. The second narrator, Quinton, the suicidal brother, had a stream of consciousness that was hard to follow. The third section, narrated by Jason, was difficult because he is so offensive. He is deeply racist and blames everyone else for his failures. Additionally, he is an angry and deceitful man. The last narrator follows their domestic servant, Dilsey, who has raised all the Compson children. It was an odd way to conclude the novel.

“The Sound and the Fury” is a tale of the decline of a wealthy southern family that failed to adapt to the new postbellum American South. The Compson family refused to embrace the new south, the south without slavery. They held tightly to their traditional values.

My head still throbs from diligently reading the novel and then poring over the interpretation. I'm so relieved to be finished.

My advice to the reader of this masterful novel of the stream of consciousness is to know what the family relationships are like:

The father of the family (who, of course, has a rather weak presence): Jason.

The mother of the family: Caroline.

The sons: Benjamin (Benjy), Quentin, Jason.

The daughter: Candace (Caddy).

Caddy's daughter: Quentin.

The first chapter is in the language of the insane Benjy.

The second chapter is in the language of Quentin (the son).

The third chapter is in the language of Jason (the son).

The fourth chapter is by the author himself.

There is also an appendix that clarifies some important points.

Each chapter of this book had a different appeal for me, and it's hard to choose which chapter I liked more. The third and fourth chapters were more fluid.

\\n  The Twilight-Colored Smell of Honeysuckle\\n

One who was reared in the rural South, perhaps with an extended family, might experience chills as I do when reveling in Faulkner's enduring phrase, "the twilight-colored smell of honeysuckle." This simple yet evocative description can stir up hazy, almost haunting memories from childhood. Memories of crepuscular visits on the veranda with relatives long since passed, their lilting voices and smiling faces somewhat obscured by the passage of time. Among them was my great-grandparent, Giovanni, who had migrated from Europe and would break into his foreign language for me. He landed at Ellis Island in 1910, a young eleven-year-old from Bologna, Italy. By the time I recall visiting him in the early 1970s, he was a jovial, bald man with a thick accent and even thicker glasses.

Traveling forward fifteen years to my college days, I came across The Sound and the Fury while perusing a national bookstore chain. I bought it, feeling that as an educated native Mississippian, I must read this mythical author from the northern part of the state to be whole. However, after reading just ten pages, I concluded that Faulkner must have been a sadist to write such a complex and seemingly impenetrable work. As a university student, I was idealistic and naive. I thought that reading this novel would prove to the world that I was better than the past of my state, that I despised the ghosts of bigotry and hate that I had no part in. I wanted to distance myself from the white sheets, fulgent from the flames on a cross (a symbol of my religion, for goodness sake), and the evil that lurked beneath those sheets. I thought that if I could read this novel, I would show that I was more intelligent than what people from afar believed. I did not want to be labeled, as Kierkegaard said, "Once you label me, you negate me."

A few years later, I tried to read it again, but ended up flustered. The sentences were still disjunctive, the thoughts totally scrambled, and characters appeared and disappeared without warning. It seemed to be changing time frames constantly, and I could make no sense of the chronology. I have since learned that in the first part of the four-part novel, Faulkner plunges the reader into the mind of the autistic Benjy without any contextualization and then constantly switches the point of reference among Benjy's many memories of childhood.

After my mother passed away six years ago, I drove from the service at the Natchez, Mississippi cemetery. I passed the sage green kudzu-blanketed bluffs of the wrinkled and outspread Mississippi River, which was shaded by a canopy of colossal oaks bountiful with pendulant Spanish moss. I then turned onto the rugged streets of old Natchez and traveled past a number of the town's many antebellum mansions.

At that time, it had been twenty-five years since my last attempt to read the novel. I had been a father myself for twelve years and was five years into a literary self-renaissance. That day, it dawned on me that I must conquer that crazy novel, not to prove anything to anyone else, but only to prove to myself that I could. By then, I understood the meaning of the now overused Faulkner quote, "The past is never passed, it's not even past."

That is to say, I cannot do anything about the stereotypes and prejudiced ignorant thinking of others from outside the South. They will forever see the ugly truth of fifty years ago as presented in their archived images from television footage and newspaper clippings. And, on their way through to south Florida, they will see a few instances of a glorified rebel flag on the pickup trucks of racist rednecks, an ever-diminishing population here, and wrongly assume that all Southerners are racist, talk slow, and think backwards.

Two out of three is bad. Yet, I cannot change others' thoughts. I can only do what I have done, which is to raise my kids in a way that makes them understand that the racism of the South's past was evil and that they should never prejudge anyone, not by the color of their skin, their religion, or where they came from. And I believe that they will raise their children the same way.

I finally read The Sound and the Fury a few years ago, with the help of a companion guide, I'll admit. This was certainly more difficult to read than any other novel I have read, but it was also the most rewarding once I cracked the code and understood and appreciated the brilliance of the complex literary devices Faulkner used and the meanings of things like the smell of wet trees, time ticking by, and the redolence of honeysuckle.

Any Southerner, whether educated or intelligent, who has not read it should give it a try. And keep trying until they succeed.