The Sound and the Fury: Story, Characters, Time, and Major Themes

Geoffrey Chen

100 Works of World Literature · Article 17

# The Sound and the Fury: Story, Characters, Time, and Major Themes

This factual guide introduces the context, characters, temporal structure, and major themes of The Sound and the Fury. It does not replace the original or claim a single correct interpretation. The one-minute introduction avoids the ending; the complete guide that follows contains major plot details and the ending.

One-minute introduction

The Sound and the Fury assembles the decline of the Southern Compson family through four unequal perspectives. During Easter weekend in 1928, non-speaking Benjy is carried from the present into childhood by smells, sounds and objects. Eighteen years earlier at Harvard, Quentin tries to control his sister Caddy’s life through family honour, time and an incest fantasy. In 1928 Jason converts resentment into financial manipulation and household violence. A final third-person section approaches Dilsey, the Black domestic worker who sustains a family no longer capable of shared life. Caddy has no narration but remains the centre of her brothers’ memories. The novel is difficult because memory replaces clock sequence and prejudice shapes perception—not because one hidden solution will make every voice agree.

Essential facts

  • Author: William Faulkner (1897–1962).
  • First publication: New York, 1929.
  • Place: Jefferson in fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi; members of the Compson family appear elsewhere in Faulkner’s fiction.
  • Title: from Macbeth’s speech describing life as a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. It does not declare the novel meaningless.
  • Four section dates: 7 April 1928; 2 June 1910; 6 April 1928; and 8 April 1928.
  • Central figures: Benjy, Quentin, Jason and Caddy Compson; Caddy’s daughter Miss Quentin; Mr and Mrs Compson; Dilsey, Luster and the family of Black servants.
  • Forms: modernist, stream-of-consciousness and multi-perspectival family novel, engaging Southern history, race, gender, class and disability.

Composition and four tellings

Faulkner said the novel began with an image: Caddy climbing a tree to look through the window at her grandmother’s funeral while her brothers saw the muddy seat of her drawers. The childhood scene already contains the design. Caddy acts and sees; her brothers watch from below and convert the sight into different meanings of courage and shame.

The author first attempted the family story through Benjy, then Quentin and Jason, and finally a third-person fourth telling. These “failures” are not interchangeable testimony. Each changes language, time and moral blindness. Caddy’s lack of a section does not make her empty. Readers must recognise her actions between male relatives’ possession, idealisation and punishment.

In 1945 Faulkner wrote “Compson: 1699–1945” for The Portable Faulkner, published in 1946. It extends the characters’ histories but is a later appendix, not an original fifth section. Editions sometimes place it first; new readers can preserve the novel’s discoveries by reading it after the 1929 text.

Benjy: 7 April 1928

Benjy turns thirty-three. He has cognitive disability, senses, remembers and vocalises but cannot explain himself in conventional language. Named Maury as a child, he was renamed Benjamin as his disability became a family shame. He follows Dilsey’s grandson Luster beside the former Compson pasture, now sold and converted to a golf course. Golfers calling “caddie” trigger his memory of Caddy, and narrative moves directly between present and childhood.

Benjy does not organise the past by calendar. Fire, fences, tree smell, clothing and voices place decades in one sensory present: Caddy caring for him and smelling like trees; the grandmother’s funeral; Caddy using perfume, courting, marrying and leaving; his father’s death; and conflict around Miss Quentin. Italics mark some transitions but not all. Caretaker, place and name are better guides.

Caddy is one of few people to understand his needs, yet Benjy experiences her development as damage to familiar order. After he grabs a passing girl, his family has him castrated. He cannot narrate consent or punishment. The event reveals violence arising from fear of disability and sexuality. His perception has artistic power without representing all disabled experience.

Quentin: 2 June 1910

The second section occurs in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Compsons sold pasture to send their eldest son to Harvard; on this day he prepares to drown himself. His father’s watch, church bells, a clock shop and shadows make time audible. Quentin breaks the watch crystal and removes its hands, but its mechanism continues. He cannot destroy time, only hear it more intensely.

Quentin’s obsession with Caddy’s virginity makes her body the last container of Southern family honour. Pregnant, Caddy marries Herbert Head, who repudiates her after learning the child is not his. Quentin tells his father that he and Caddy committed incest, hoping a supposedly grand shared sin can contain or assume her sexual history. The incest did not happen. He also confronts Dalton Ames, the likely father, but changes nothing.

Quentin’s syntax fragments as childhood, conversations with Caddy, his father’s scepticism about virginity and time, and encounters in Cambridge overlap. He carefully arranges his room and clothes, obtains weights and goes to the Charles River. Ritual preparation gives an appearance of control while completing self-destruction after his inability to make others inhabit his ideal.

Jason: 6 April 1928

Jason’s language is more linear, not more reliable. Racist, misogynist grievance blames Caddy, Black servants, Northerners, Jewish traders and anyone refusing obedience. Herbert might have supplied a bank job; when Caddy’s marriage fails, Jason turns the lost opportunity into lifelong revenge against her and Miss Quentin.

Mrs Compson bans Caddy from the home, so Caddy sends support for her daughter. Jason intercepts it, deceives mother and niece, and locks the accumulated cash in his room while speculating in cotton. He calls himself provider but leaves care to Dilsey. Claims of efficiency collapse whenever anger draws him from work.

Miss Quentin resists a home without love or liberty, skips school and meets a travelling-show performer. Jason chases, threatens and beats her, repeating his punishment of Caddy’s uncontrollable sexuality. Quentin idealised and froze his sister; Jason converts women into money, obedience and loss. Neither brother permits an independent life.

Dilsey and 8 April 1928

On Easter morning, third-person narration widens to the house and Black community, following Dilsey as she cooks, cleans and cares. She takes Benjy and Luster to church, where a visiting preacher joins suffering, resurrection and time. Dilsey has seen the Compsons’ beginning and end. Her temporal sense accepts change, unlike Quentin stopping clocks or Jason turning history into debt.

Calling this “Dilsey’s first-person section” is inaccurate: she never receives the brothers’ interior monologue. White collapse depends upon poorly rewarded Black care. The novel makes her an ethical centre but remains shaped by a white author’s period, dialect and service roles. Praising her only as a loyal maternal saint can turn racial obligation into virtue.

Miss Quentin escapes with the performer and takes Jason’s hoard, much of which derives from support sent for her. Unable to explain the money’s source to police, Jason pursues and fails. He has not simply lost legitimate savings to a stranger; his manipulated account turns against him.

In the ending, Luster drives the carriage around the Confederate monument by an unfamiliar route and Benjy screams. Jason strikes Luster and reverses the carriage. As direction becomes familiar, Benjy quiets and objects return to their expected order. Family and history are not healed. Violence restores a surface arrangement, exposing the thinness of the Compsons’ remaining “normal”.

Time, voice, and technique

The dates are not chronological: the 1910 day is enclosed by three in 1928. Benjy makes past present; Quentin fights time; Jason measures it as interest and loss; Easter gives the fourth section a longer ritual scale. Reconstructing chronology does not make form disposable. Each temporal habit preserves or injures.

Stream of consciousness is not unedited thought. Repetition, sensory triggers, punctuation, dialect and omission control reading. The syntactically clearest brother, Jason, lies most fluently; fragmented Benjy preserves scenes the family avoids. Grammatical transparency and ethical reliability do not correspond.

Major themes

Memory and time. The past is bodily and linguistic present, not finished background. Characters fail when memory cannot coexist with change.

Caddy and looking. Each brother makes Caddy caretaker, purity symbol or financial enemy. Readers reconstruct her through projections while accepting that no complete Caddy becomes available.

Honour and gender. Men blame female sexuality for decline, although land sales, alcoholism, economic failure and racial privilege already corrode the house. Honour transfers structural failure onto women’s bodies.

Race and Southern decline. A white family describes lost status while Dilsey’s family labour sustains it. The novel exposes dependence without wholly escaping period racial imagination.

Money and land. Pasture becomes a golf course; Harvard, marriage, child support and cotton speculation turn feeling into exchange. Money Jason hoards enables Miss Quentin’s escape.

Language and misunderstanding. Four tellings yield no neutral final version. Understanding requires comparison and judgement of narratorial limits.

Common oversimplifications

First, treating Benjy’s section as random misses sensory triggers and caretaker ages. Saying he understands nothing ignores exact feeling; making him a mystic erases circumstance. Second, Quentin’s incest claim is fantasy, not event. Third, defining Caddy as fallen repeats her brothers’ control. Fourth, calling Dilsey omniscient or naturally servile ignores third-person distance and racial labour. Fifth, a calmer final carriage is not restored family order: Jason’s violence and the women’s departures remain.

Literary significance and reading suggestions

The novel makes Southern family, racial history and matter the subject of modernist voice. It established Faulkner as a major experimental American novelist; the Nobel Prize later cited his distinct contribution to modern fiction.

Begin with the four dates and focal figures rather than a total chronology. In Benjy’s transitions, identify whether Caddy, T. P. or Luster is caring for him. Distinguish brother Quentin in 1910 from Caddy’s daughter Miss Quentin in 1928. On rereading, follow trees, smell, clocks, fire, water, money and fences. Mark the 1946 appendix as later than the novel. Compare translations’ handling of unpunctuated passages, dialect and names.

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