Book Club Guide

The Sound and the Fury

by William Faulkner · 1929 · Psychology

Key themes

The decay of the Southern aristocracy and its inability to adapt
Time, consciousness and the impossibility of innocence
Caddy — the absent centre around whom everything revolves

About this book

In many ways this was an experimental novel, using several differing narrative styles. Divided into four parts, the author relates the same episodes from four different viewpoints, using a different s

Published in 1929, The Sound and the Fury is widely considered Faulkner's masterpiece. He said he began with the image of a little girl with muddy drawers up in a tree — and kept trying to tell her story until he got it right.

Discussion questions

The novel has four sections with very different narrative styles — Benjy's non-linear consciousness, Quentin's fractured stream, Jason's bitter directness, and a more conventional third-person close. How do these four perspectives each illuminate what the others cannot?
Caddy, who is arguably the emotional centre of the novel, is never given her own section. What does Faulkner achieve by keeping her at a remove — seen only through her brothers' obsessions?
Quentin's section is one of the most analysed passages in American literature — a consciousness that cannot escape the past. What does Faulkner do formally to create the sense of time collapsing?
Jason is the novel's most straightforward narrator — coherent, bitter, comprehensible. Is this clarity part of his characterisation, or is Faulkner suggesting that a certain kind of narrowness is actually more legible?
The Sound and the Fury is considered one of the most difficult novels in English. Was the difficulty productive for you — did it create meaning, or obstruct it?