Four narrators, four sections, one doomed Southern family, and the first narrator is Benjy, whose mind cannot sequence time. Faulkner wrote this in a fury, sensing he was doing something new, and the novel requires readers to assemble meaning from fragments, to feel before they understand. Quentin Compson drowns himself at Harvard; Jason rages at the modern world; Dilsey endures. The Compson family represents the South's decay, but the novel is not allegory; it is experience, immersive and disorienting. Faulkner said he failed and then spent his career rewriting it. The failure is a kind of perfection.