From Powells.com
Told in four narratives from four different points of view, The Sound and
the Fury is Faulkner's masterpiece. Given life by the voice of her three
brothers (Benjy, Quentin and Jason) and an omniscient narrator, this is
the tragic story of Caddy Compson and her family, a tale, as Shakespeare
noted, "told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
His fourth novel and the second to take place in Faulkner's microcosmic
world of Yoknapatawpha County, the characters would return again and
again, haunting his short stories, the Snopes Trilogy and giving a voice
to his later masterpiece, Absalom Absalom. Often viewed as the strongest
of Faulkner's works, this book was voted a place in the top 10 of the Modern Library's 100 Greatest Novels of the Twentieth Century.
Synopses & Reviews
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Synopsis
The Sound and the Fury was the novel that marked the beginning of Faulkner's greatest sequence of fiction and established the dark side of the southlands as his undisputed literary territory. It chronicles the disintegration of a once-genteel southern family in the words of three brothers and their black servant. Quentin is doomed by incestuous passion, while Jason is ridden by pettiness and greed, and the tragic Benjy is an idiot child of thirty-three. Only the decency of the maidservant Dilsey offers counterpoint to their corroded humanity.