In the Library
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner, 1929
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 7 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 4
- Length
- Length 97k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
The reading guide, in the app
How to Read The Sound and the Fury
A novel famous for an opening that nobody is meant to understand on a first pass, which is the single most freeing thing you can learn about it before you begin.
The reputation that reaches you says The Sound and the Fury is the one even confident readers give up on, a book that withholds the most basic information about who is speaking and when, and that you would need a chart and a critical edition just to know what is happening. The reputation is built almost entirely on the opening section, and it is fair about that section and badly unfair about the book as a whole. What it never tells you is that the difficulty front-loads itself, that the novel gets steadily clearer as it goes, and that by the final pages it has become as plain and as moving as anything you have read.
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About the book
The title comes from the blackest speech in Macbeth, the one about a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, and Faulkner takes it literally. The novel opens inside the mind of Benjy Compson, who cannot tell this morning from thirty years past, for whom his sister Caddy survives only as the smell of trees and an ache he has no words to hold. The same ruin of one Southern family is then told again, and again, and again: by Quentin, drowning in time at Harvard; by Jason, mean and grasping; and at last by Dilsey, the Black servant who endures because she never believed the Compson name was worth a thing. To read it is to climb out of Benjy's dark, mind by mind, into the still light of Dilsey's Easter morning. And at the centre of every voice stands Caddy, the lost girl her brothers circle and none can keep, whom the novel itself loves too much to ever let speak for herself.