The Sound and the Fury

Rating:
Summary: The treasure is buried a little deeper...
Review: Though Sound and the Fury is generally classified as a more advanced novel, it is not difficult to read. Understanding the novel is another matter. This is the tale of the Compsons: Benjy - a mentally retarded man who can neither speak nor tell time, Quentin - obsessed with his sister Caddy, and willing to die for her, Jason - a miser after Scrooge's own heart, and Dilsey - the all-knowing family servant. The story centers on Caddy, a wild female with many affairs, and a daughter born out of wedlock. There are four sections of the novel, each told by the characters above, save Caddy, who does not need a section because the book revolves around her. However, the gift of this novel lies not in the story, but in the symbolism. A missing quarter and golf ball, the way Caddy smells like trees, a snake found near a tree, Caddy's dirty undergarments - all symbolize something bigger. Couple that with the outstanding imagery of Benjy's drunkenness and his idea of Caddy's absence, Jason's cruelty, Dilsey's understanding, and Quentin's fractured grammar as his oxygen runs out, and one is left with a story that is emotional, intriguing, and complex.
*A hint for those reading this book alone - start with Jason's chapter (#3), then Disley (#4), then return to the beginning - this allows for a more comprehensive reading.

Rating:
Summary: The Emperor Has No Clothes
Review: Remember that story? It was about a kingdom of people who were so afraid of looking foolish that they went along with whatever they were told. They took their cue from their vain and silly king, who had so little character that he let a conman convince him to walk naked in a royal procession. Enough said.

Rating:
Summary: I know it has merit, I just couldn't follow it
Review: I'm told I went about this book all wrong: I read it from beginning to end. Apparently, I should have started with the last part and then gone back to the beginning. Unless you're a lirerary genius, I wouldn't recommend tackling this book on your own (that is without the assistance of a literature class). Once I understood the story, the first three parts made sense and I must say they are quite an accomplishment. Faulkner really gets into the head of each character, but so much so, that if you're not dysfunctional enough, it's next to impossible to follow. While I realize that this book is praised to the high heavens as a major milestone in literary accomplishment, I give it three stars, because I believe that while literature shouldn't cater to the lowest common denominator, it should at least be decipherable to intelligent, educated people (I would consider myself a member of this group).

Rating:
Summary: stream of consciousness that tells a tale
Review: This 'experimental' stream of consciousness novel is the only of its particular format that I have ever appreciated. The style, I am thankful, did not 'take.' If it had, I fear I would have never been able to have consumed such an abundance of glorious twentieth century fiction. Faulkner's unconscious and conscious symbol/language romp works well, especially with the perceptions of a non-verbal, impaired child and the agonies of memories formed in youth and contained in the far less happy older years.
The problem with these s of c writings is that one spends so much effort trying to put it together that the mood evaporates in the process. That is not the case with The Sound and The Fury, the emotional grief, and anxiety comes through ahead of the meaning, and in that regard, I find it achieves its purpose of being of the realm of unconscious processes. Genius that he was, Faulkner could be said to have chosen a story and characters that were suited to this structure or, lack of it.
My own belief about the form however, is that a good clear brilliance in narrative and plot is more evocative and probably more powerful with regard to activating the wild non-verbal brain- but the truth is, no one can say for sure. This is a moving tale and not such a puzzle, that it loses its heartfelt story.

Rating:
Summary: Raw
Review: Faulkner was one of the first to seriously implement "stream of consciousness" (William James) writing. S & F is a difficult book, coded by abrupt time sequences, repitition, and character bias. In the first page, you discover that Benjy has the mind of a child, despite his adulthood. He stalks the golf course and cries whenever people say "Caddie." Benjy himself tells us, through 75 pages, about his sister Caddy who left. ...P>Caddy's absence is the one motion in his life. Everything else, like "the hand went away" or the sun "that went away" is a foreground to the further motion of Caddy. And it was Caddy, alone, who treated Benjy like a human being. But she left when she got pregnant, and the pasture was sold off so Quentin could go to school. Benjy misses the pasture and Caddy, while Jason resents that fact that Quentin wasted the money by killing himself while he (Jason) is left to a dull working class.

Next up is Quentin. He is obsessed by his watch and the encroaching mortality therein. He seems to love Caddy but accuses himself of having slept with her while in reality he did not. ...

In the Jason narrative, you have violent defeatism. ...

This book takes place in 4 days and tells the same story over and over again. Faulkner himself said that the whole story is told in the Benjy section. He comments that Caddy has no narration because she is "too beautiful." She is the focal point to all the other characters and consequently, they are trapped in a cul de sac of the past.

This is an experimental book that luckily payed off. It is one the top five novels I have read. I will never forget Benjy and Caddy. As for Quentin, his section alone is a masterpiece of how psychology translates to literature. It is like no other book. It reads like fifty thoughts taking place at once. Hence the realism.

Rating:
Summary: About the sound and the fury
Review: here is a collected text of my project on the sound and the fury.

Rating:
Summary: A milestone of American literature
Review: I don't consider myself a "pretentious" reader at all--and I usually don't care for novels that are self-consciously "pretentious." The Sound and the Fury is a difficult novel, it is a deep novel, and it is a groundbreaking novel--none of these qualities makes it inherently "pretentious." Faulkner himself never anticipated "S&F" receiving much critical response--the storyline is a continuation of the Yoknapatawpha chronicle he began in "Flags in the Dust"; the style he employed was mainly a form of personal literary experimentation. As a result, "S&F" is by far the most solipsistic of Faulkner's novels; to this day, literary critics are unable to divine the import of some scenes and snatches of dialogue. So why should you read it? Because it marks the debut of Faulkner as a "great" writer with his own unique style and mode of expression. It takes Joyce's stream-of-consciousness style (which was so frustrating and abstract in "Ulysses") and gives it substance and purpose. The rotating point-of-view (which today is common to find in literary *and* popular fiction) has its unmistakable roots here, where Faulkner delves deeply into the troubled minds of three very different people: a mentally-incapacitated "manchild," a neurotic-depressive, and an unabashed (at times scathing) cynic. And all of the events take place against the backdrop of a haunted South. In my opinion "S&F" is second only to Absalom, Absalom! as Faulkner's greatest work. It is truly a novel you must read twice: the first time to acquaint yourself with the characters and daunting style; the second time, to fully appreciate what Faulkner is trying to say about his characters and their environment. Above all, don't be put off by the style. "The Sound and the Fury" is not an easy book, but it is definitely a great one.

Rating:
Summary: Pretentious, Confusing, but VERY interesting.
Review: I can really understand why people have a love/hate relationship with this book. I read it only one time through, without the aid of Cliff Notes and such, and I thought I had gotten the story, for the most part. But then I checked those notes after I read the novel and realized that I had been wrong about quite a few major things (...). Maybe I just hadn't read the novel "carefully" enough, but it also didn't merit a second read-through of the book. But nevertheless I did enjoy the book, as it challenged the reader to assume the role of a "detective" to piece together the fragmented parts of the story. As I read it I felt, in movie terms, this book had the pretentious nature of Magnolia combined with the narrative of Memento, not in all a bad thing, but literature-wise I had no idea where to categorize it. I give it three stars because of the ambitious nature of this work, and the way it challenged the reader's intellect, but I'd have to deduct two due to the fact that, as Faulkner himself stated, it failed in that it was not clear. And ultimately, a story has to be made clear to perpetuate some point, it can't become an abstract painting. The reading does get easier as you get further into the book, and becomes much more readable as you go on. You just have to stick with it. This is NOT leisure reading.

Rating:
Summary: strong and forceful, without movement
Review: Mr. Faulkner (that's right--Mister--) wrote a hell of a book. Here is a perspectivist masterpiece that essentially defined the man's entire career. And yet something today is lost . . .

The voices carry us through much of the same events, then chronologically extend time, and each with its own way of looking and private obsessions. This, sadly, makes for an at times confusing read. The force and the feeling of these seperate identities is strong and perhaps the confusion was intended, evoking, in the end, such an exhausted and outraged huff of air that you can feel the essence of the final narrator's frustration.

It's a great story told in minutia too.

Rating:
Summary: Am I supposed to think this is great?
Review: Let me ask you a question. If you wrote a letter to a friend, and it made no sense, had no segways, no understanding of time and place, should your friend consider you a genius since you didn't understand the freakin letter?! No! SO then why is this book GREAT?! I mean I guess I can applaud faulkner for doing something different, but I could record a duck bouncing on car horns and sell it as avant garde, that doesn't make it "innovative", or "Ground breaking". I'm giving this two starts because I think Faulkner's intentions were good. But if you NEED cliff notes to help you out, then the book is far to confusing and needs top be revised. All of us aspiring writers out there know that if we handed something like this in to our agent, it would be burned.