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The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner It is a common knowledge that we live in 2208 and there is a world government under a governor who orders that all literature should be destroyed. However, despite the necessity to obey this strict regulation, there is an obvious truth that not all literature should be destroyed. There are some books that should be rescued and stay put into our secret compartment. The Sound and the Fury written by William Faulkner is one of such books.
The present paper examines the novel and is aimed to prove that this book should be saved because this novel is one of the greatest contributions to the U. S. literature, and one of the author's most heartfelt literary works, recognized for its experimental form, understanding of specific aspects of the American South, and outstanding Faulkner's style characterized by narrator shifts, unconventional sentence structure and punctuation, frequent time shifts, and a stream-of-consciousness technique revealing the inner thoughts of characters to the reader. No doubt, The Sound and the Fury can be called one of the most brilliant works written by William Faulkner, a talented American novelist and writer. To put it differently, William Faulkner belongs to the most famous and the most significant writers of the United States, the master of new American prose of the 20 th century. According to Bloom (1998), the novel is one of the best Faulkner's novels, and its importance only appears in the larger context of novels to which it gives rise, and at that point it comes to seem indispensable. (Bloom 115) This most American of all other U.
S. writers also became one of the most influential writers in the world. In his The Sound and the Fury, the author used plain spoke language and American customs and traditions, and managed to masterly combine these elements with literature modernism and the boldest European experiments in symbolism and in the stream of consciousness narrative technique. Indeed, in one of the great achievements of The Sound and the Fury is that in a novel which most critics now agree is centrally concerned with language, in a novel three of whose sections are "monologues" that gesture toward orally, Faulkner turns the clumsy mechanics of the representation of that language on paper, what Stephen Ross calls "the visual discourse of our reading" into a highly expressive part of the language itself. (Polk 103) The authors life experience was reflected in this work. William Faulkner also masterly portrayed psychological traits of the generation managed to survive war and peace. The Sound and the Fury is a novel is about the doom of the South (Bloom 136), a symbolical birth of William Faulkner, as this was his first novel where the author managed to create his own, unique and unsurpassable literary style.
With the publication of this novel in 1929 a completely new world, new country has emerged on the literary world map. This new imaginary country is a Yoknapatawpha County in the south of America, a tiny part of the land merely a stamp-size width. This unity of the place, steadiness and repetition of William Faulkner's characters and situations he describes in his novel introduces to his world a touch of completeness and turns his literary works into some sort of a modern saga. When reading this novel, one can easily say that the amazing world William Faulkner managed to create in his The Sound and the Fury bears a strong resemblance to a cornerstone of the universe, and, although one can claim that this foundation stone is too small, if one would destroy it, all universe would be destroyed in a minute.
This novel portrays family tribulation as a decline from greatness: idiocy, madness, alcoholism, promiscuity, and theft as symptoms of a tragic Fall of Southern Princes. (Kartiganer 3) The measure of Faulkner's creative efforts is predetermined. His Yoknapatawpha County is a concentration of all world passions, struggles and conflicts. (Duvall and Abadie 112) However, it should be also taken into consideration that his Yoknapatawpha County reflects also a local, complex and dramatic history of the U. S. South. William Faulkner masterly shows the real processes when the destruction of old slave-owning system occurs, and bourgeois reality is being born. The author describes these changes with all passion, raising his The Sound and the Fury to the highest emotional level ever possible.
This talented attempt can also be explained by the writer's origin, as he is the descendant of the planter's family and was raised in and affected by the culture and history of the South in general and the state of Mississippi, where he was born, in particular. The Sound and the Fury continues to develop the theme of doomed patriarchal traditions of the planters South, the decay and dehumanization of its social relations. William Faulkner interconnects degradation of the South with the fatal flaw admitted by people in the past - the adoption of slavery. The people, who were born by this cruel and useless civilization, die together with the decay of this southern civilization. At the same time, it should be mentioned that William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury is a completely new, a real pioneering work in the field of literature.
His narrative achievements in this novel may be explained in terms of his ability to express abstract themes by means of stylized characters without detracting from the dramatic force, and the apparent realism, of his narrative situations. (Swiggart 5) This work is still the subject of heated debates. The main ideas and themes portrayed in this novel are related to the life of southerners; however, although it is a fictional novel, the story seems to be very real and very tragic. There is no romantic pathos, which played an important role in other novels written by William Faulkner. This is the world of dreadful and scaring ordinary life, economic and social degradation of the Common family, complete decay of moral standards leading to the crash of one of the richest and the noblest families of the American South. The main idea William Faulkner wanted to introduce to the reader, the decay of the family is whimsically combined with the emotional atmosphere of the forgiveness to all, and brilliant Faulkner's humor with its apotheosis in the sermon in the church. In this respect, his novel is very unique.
Although William Faulkner uses his favorite stream of consciousness narrative technique, his novel is very realistic. The author definitely managed to create complex characters, to motivate their actions psychologically, and to show all complex nature of their lives, and all important changes, which took place in the American South after the civil war. Taking into account all these facts, in conclusion it can be said that this book written by William Faulkner should be saved due to unsurpassed Faulkner's talent, his outstanding understanding of specific aspects of the American South, and the authors amazing combination of the spoken language and American customs and traditions, masterly combined with literature modernism and the boldest European experiments in symbolism and in the stream of consciousness narrative technique. Works Cited Bloom, Harold. The Sound and the Fury.
Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1988. Duvall, John N. and J. Abadie. Faulkner and Postmodernism: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha.
Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. Kartiganer, Donald M. The Fragile Thread: The Meaning of Form in Faulkner's Novels. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979. Polk, Noel. Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner.
Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Swiggart, Peter. The Art of Faulkner's Novels. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1962.
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