Analysis Of William Faulkner's "The Sound And The Fury"

In “The sound and the fury” , William Falkner demonstrate your interested in decline of aristocracy after the Civil War. Through the emergence of the families of the South and in a society in which these aristocratic values ​​were as important as the religious, the reputation and the different functions performed by men and women, the author describes the process of disintegration and decay of traditional family and Compsons its descendants in recent racist environment of the southern United States.

Faulkner shows the breakdown of each character in this novel Mrs. Compson is egocentric and remains emotionally distant children. Quentin can not see the sins of his family and is clinging to old traditions. Caddy indulges promiscuity, Jason waste your intelligence by being too greedy and Benjy shows the decline of this family through their inability to differentiate moral and immoral. At the conclusion of this novel, Dilsey is the only loving member of the household, the only character who maintains her values without the corrupting influence of self-absorption. She therefore comes to represent a hope for the renewal of traditional Southern values in an uncorrupted and positive form.

Faulkner used modern techniques, as stream of consciousness of the characters, structures, non-linear time and space, and especially different narrative voices to compose this story, which could not even have been completely understood at the time.

His decision to use four different narrators highlights the subjectivity of narrative. Benjy, Quentin, and Jason have vastly different views on the Compson tragedy, but no single perspective seems more valid than the others.Even with four narrators providing the depth of four different perspectives, Faulkner believed that his language and narrative still fell short.

As a Europeans James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner adopts a narrative style known as stream of consciousness that tries to reproduce the mental activity of the narrator, so it has the feel of each character with respect to the situation in which they live. In this novel, this stream is not just a stylistic artifice but an important piece of the puzzle, a given supplement to understanding the plot.

The change of time is evident in the novel and revolutionary for the time. Faulkner suggests that time is not a constant or objectively understandable entity, and that humans can interact with it in a variety of ways.

In brief,Faulkner uses several narrative resources to weave every part of this novel, as a stream of consciousness, change of time and narrator. Also criticizes the aristocratic standards of that time. All this contributed to this work was one of the most rich and complex for the time.