Review of The Sound and The Fury

Faulkner’s The Sound and Th Fury

 Reviewed by Author Roy Murry

In William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and The Fury, he uses a new way of understanding of what is happening at a given point of time. It was called ‘Stream of consciousness.’ I learnt the method and applied it to my main character in my novel The Audubon Caper.

Faulkner’s style was so prolific that he won two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction – A Fable and The Rivers. He was relatively unknown until receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. It was his The Sound and The Fury I read for my American Literature college course.

This story of a declining Southern aristocrat family is broken down into four distinct sections of time. Each time period has a narrator who dabbles into the history of the family and its black servants. The narrators sometime rabble on, but their rabbling have a point – they are losing power over their society.

From a historical point of view, I found the background information as good as any historical novel I have read. And, I have read many.

I enjoyed the way Faulkner’s writing brought out the sorrow that happened in the South after the loss of the Civil War. It was a decline of an era where land owners ruled over the populous and the slaves made them money from the brutal work they did.

Southerners of America had to change their ways. This is what Faulkner told best in the narrators. They needed to change their ways or lose their aristocratic position.    

The Sound and The Fury: http://amzn.to/1CitVpb