The Sound and the Fury

⚖The case for it

Faulkner said the whole novel grew from one image: a girl up a pear tree in muddy underwear, looking through a window her brothers were too afraid to climb to. He then refuses to give her a section of her own, and "the technique of letting us see her through other's eyes" hits harder than any direct account could. Jason narrates the third part, and readers keep calling him "one of my favourite characters in fiction" precisely because he is "the villain with a good reason to be a villain." Benjy's opening genuinely inhabits a mind that cannot separate past from present. Dilsey closes the book as "a moral anchor amid the madness," the stretch of clear prose both camps agree on.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The opening section drops you inside a mind with no chronology and no signposts, "dropped into a chaotic, emotional whirlwind with no map," and readers reach for Cliffs Notes to work out who is speaking. Time shifts "forward and backward by decades even within a single sentence," marked by italics that some editions fail to preserve. The dialect compounds it, "a nearly impenetrable mass of old school southern dialect," and audiobook listeners fare worse. What waits at the end of the work is a family nobody warms to, readers reporting "a difficult time having any empathy for any of the Compson family." One finished "so confused that your brain starts to ooze out your ears."

— the honest librarian

7h

honest hours

10

sittings