William Faulkner’s, The Sound and the Fury, is a novel “about disorder, disintegration, and the absence of perspective” (Bowling, p 565) and this is reflected in the composition of the novel. Upon first reading it is notoriously difficult to locate the temporal setting as events move through different time periods without any announcement. When the novel was originally published, critics praised it and criticised it for this technique. Of the latter view, seeing it as unnecessary, Granville Hicks wrote that “”One can almost imagine Mr. Faulkner inventing his stories in the regular chronological order and then recasting them in some distorted form” (Hicks, p 22)
In Soldier’s Pay, Mosquitoes, and Sartoris, his first three novels, Faulkner had used the third-person omniscient narrative to tell the story. The problem he had encountered using this technique was with complexity of characterization. So, for The Sound and the Fury he turned to the first-person narrative, with extreme use of the interior monologue. By removing his own voice from the story, Faulkner was able to solve this problem and create a much more elaborate, intriguing narrative.
Faulkner claimed to have never read Ulysses by James Joyce until after he had finished the writing of The Sound and the Fury. In interviews he has said that he had read Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and some excerpts of Ulysses in magazines, but he had never read the whole book until much later. This is surprising to learn because Faulkner uses techniques quite similar to those applied by Joyce in Ulysses. Faulkner’s use of stream-of-consciousness would suggest Joyce had played an influence; most particularly in Quentin’s section, June second 1910, where at times the stream-of-consciousness technique is similar to that of the Penelope section which Ulysses finishes on.
Quentin’s section begins in a normal fashion: “When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o’clock and than I was in time again, hearing the watch” (The Sound and the Fury, p 74). From this opening it is clear that Quentin has taken on the role of first-person narrator, describing his environment as sparsely as setting is described elsewhere in the novel. For the first five paragraphs a repetition occurs; Quentin will narrate at the start, trying to remain objective in what we are being told, only for it quickly to become a memory of a conversation he had with his father.This occurs up until we reach the fifth paragraph, when we are allowed our first glimpse of the stream of Quentin’s thoughts: “She ran right out of the mirror, out of the banked scent. Roses. Roses. Mr and Mrs Jason Richmond Compson announce the marriage of” (The Sound and the Fury, p 75). To distinguish between the thoughts that Quentin is having here, Faulkner uses italics. Before the italics we are shown the thoughts Quentin is having in a controlled way, the things he does not mind us seeing. This sudden burst of italicised thought is something that has suddenly flashed through his mind, without his control.
The occurrence of these uncontrolled thoughts of Quentin’s appear more and more frequently as the section progresses, with the passage of time through the day that he is having. These sections, the memories Quentin is having of the past, do not indicate the passage of time, however, instead “italics mark off not time layers but themes and motifs; and syntax appears to have a new set of rules” (Toker, p 119).
Faulkner, like Joyce, uses external actions to indicate the workings of the characters minds. When Quentin is thinking about his books this becomes associated with his father:
I carried the books into the sitting-room and stacked them on the table, the ones I had brought from home and the ones Father said it used to be a gentleman was known by his books; nowadays he is known by the ones he has not returned and locked the trunk and addressed it” (The Sound and the Fury, p 79)
A more striking act of association by Quentin is when he meets the boys fishing:
‘What do you want to go to the Eddy for?’ the second boy said. ‘You can fish at the mill if you want to.’
‘Ah, let him go,’ the third said. They looked after the first boy. Sunlight slid patchily across his walking shoulders, glinting along the pole like yellow ants.
‘Kenny,’ the second said. Say it to Father will you I will am my fathers Progenitive I invented him created I him Say it to him it will not be for he will say I was not and then you and I since philoprogenitive (The Sound and the Fury, p 121).
Quentin’s problems are here exposed for how significant they may really be. The boys wish to swim and fish, yet Quentin connects their search for a good swimming spot with his own search for water. Quentin’s complex mental problems, regarding his relationship with his father, are clearly seen and the boys simple wish to swim “grotesquely parallels Quentin’s search for an appropriate suicide bridge” (Groden, p 274).
Even though this section of the novel is told through a continuous narrative, there is a shifting temporal location throughout the section. Only on re-reading can the clues to the time markers be understood. At the beginning of the section we are told that Spoade would only have been seen in a shirt around noon. Later in the section, it is said “Spoade had his shirt on; then it must be” (The Sound and the Fury, p 118). We are not told what “it” is but we can infer that the time is midday.
The time markers placed in this section are important to our understanding of how quickly the day is passing. Gaps in the present narrative can make us lose our grasp on the day’s events. Quentin’s thoughts can slip into a memory and when we return to the outer world his movements have brought him to a new location. In this situation “our hold on the fictional present becomes as uncertain as Quentin’s grasp on reality” (Toker, p 119).
In Faulkner’s view to try to isolate the present from past events would have rendered his characters to be less than human. For Faulkner, the present and past were inseparable in the consciousness of human beings. He believed that “to isolate the past from the present was to falsify the very nature of time[…]The authentic human being lives in the past and future as well as in the present” (Brooks, p 268). Consciousness and time are inseparable things, without the living consciousness time is only an abstract concept. The whole of Faulkner’s work was to consider the impact of the past on the present consciousness.
Thus, Quentin’s breaking of his watch is a symbolic act. Quentin does not want to acknowledge time anymore. He is troubled by the past to such an extent that it drives him to his suicide. He breaks his watch to try and change the time around him because time does not exist when it is being counted on a clock, it is only real if there are no clocks (Sartre, p 266). The breaking of the watch is an attempt to escape the past, but, significantly, the watch does still tick.
There is use of repetition throughout Quentin’s section; repetition could be seen as part of the structure of the novel. From the opening paragraphs and throughout the section there is constant repetition. This is because for Faulkner “memory is always repetition, being and living is never repetition” (Minter 1981, p 95). Quentin is incapable of living in the present moment, he tries but the longer the day goes on the more he is troubled by his memories of the past; by his memories of his father and of Caddy.
Apart from Faulkner’s use of interior monologue, stream-of-consciousness, and shifting time frame, there is another intriguing aspect to the novel. Repetition of individual words can be noticed which have an important function in our understanding of the characters in The Sound and the Fury. In Benjy’s section the important word is fire, and the theme of his part is bright, glowing shapes and objects. For Quentin’s section, the word is shadow.
The word shadow is mentioned in Quentin’s section a total of forty-nine times, so it is clearly an important theme for this section of the novel. It contrasts with Benjy’s fire of the previous section, the repeated use of the word “shadow” warns us of the looming downfalls and tragedies that are in store for the Compton family. Although they have been alluded to in Benjy’s section of the novel, it is only in Quentin’s section that we start to become capable of piecing the different story patterns together. Benjy did not have the verbal capabilities to tell us all that had happened, whereas Quentin can elucidate his thoughts more coherently for us to gleam some information – even if those thoughts are quite dark.
Quentin notices his shadow repeatedly in this section. It is something that weighs on him, that follows him ominously and that he must try to avoid: “Then it was past. I got off and stood in my shadow and after a while a car came along and I got on and went back to the interurban station” (The Sound and the Fury, p 103). Quentin also thinks of his shadow in an anthropomorphic way: “The shadow hadn’t quite cleared the stoop. I stopped inside the door, watching the shadow move. It moved almost perceptibly, creeping back inside the door… the floating shadow” (The Sound and the Fury, p 79).
Another important word in this section is the word “lantern”. In one short passage the word is used seven times over two pages. Quentin is told by Hatcher about his lantern he keeps in case of emergencies, such as a flood. This is his ability to shed light himself wherever he needs to – he can see what was once unclear and solve problems himself. This is in contrast to Quentin, who Faulkner is telling us “that there is a tragedy to the man who cannot predict or measure or make use of his innate abilities to accept and comprehend nature and change for what it is” and that Quentin’s misfortune will come because of his “future blindness to his own strengths” (Martin, p 51).
The character of Quentin can be seen as comprising what Faulkner called the “human heart in conflict with itself” (Essays, p 119). Asked about the symbolism of Quentin’s shadow, Faulkner said that it was Quentin’s inner conflict with his own choice. The stepping in and out of the shadow was Quentin attempting to resolve the turmoil with his past memories, that:
that shadow that stayed on his mind so much was foreknowledge of his own death, that he was – Death is here, shall I step into it or shall I step away from it a little longer? I won’t escape it, but shall I accept it now or shall I put it off until next Friday. I think that if it had any reason that must have been it (Minter 1986, p 235).
William Faulkner’s influences are easy to see, but he did not simply rework those ideas into his own fiction. Instead, he elaborated upon and advanced those ideas in a fashion that put him far ahead of any other American writer of his time. In Quentin’s section the influence of James Joyce is plain to see, but what Faulkner did with the Joycean techniques went even further beyond the wide scope Joyce had attempted himself. The mental state that Faulkner attempted to portray in Quentin’s section is only comparable to, maybe, the character of Warren Septimus Smith, in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. The difference being that Faulkner created a much more forceful, realistic character. The mental state we are presented with can be disturbing, but it is because he tackled such difficult mental states that The Sound and the Fury is considered one of the great Modernist novels and William Faulkner is regarded as one of the greatest writers of that era.
Bibliography
Bowling, Lawrence Edward. “Faulkner: Technique of “The Sound and the Fury”” The Kenyon Review, 10:4 1948, pp. 552-566. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/4332979.pdf>
Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond. New Haven and London; Yale University Press, 1978.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. London; Vintage, 1995.
Faulkner, William. Essays, Speeches & Public Letters. Ed. James B. Meriwether. New York; Random House, 1965.
Groden, Michael. “Criticism in New Composition: Ulysses and The Sound and the Fury”. Twentieth Century Literature, 21;3, 1975, pp. 265-277. <http://www.jstor.org.eproxy.ucd.ie/stable/pdfplus/440564.pdf>
Hicks, Granville. “The Past and Future of William Faulkner”. The Bookman, September, 1931, pp. 22.
Martin, Robert A..“The Words of “The Sound and the Fury””. The Southern Literary Journal, 32;1 1999, pp. 46-56. <http://www.jstor.org.eproxy.ucd.ie/stable/pdfplus/20078252.pdf?acceptTC=true >
Minter, David. William Faulkner: His Life and Work. London and Baltimore; John Hopkins University, 1981.
Minter, David. “The Self’s Own Lamp.” William Faulkner. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York; Chelsea House, 1986
Sartre, Jean-Paul. “On The Sound and the Fury: Time in the Work of Faulkner.” In The Sound and the Fury. Ed. David Minter. New York: Norton, 1994.
Toker, Leona. Diffusion of Information in “The Sound and the Fury”. College Literature, 15;2 1988, pp. 111-135.
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