Here is a book discussion guide listed on my library's website. Since you need to be authorized login, I provided the whole guide.
The Sound and the Fury
by
William Faulkner
(Originally published 1929
This edition: New York, Vintage, 1984)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Author:
Never a bootlegger, barnstormer, airline pilot, or merchant seaman as he sometimes claimed, William Faulkner was in reality something far rarer than any of those things: perhaps the greatest American novelist of the twentieth century and the yardstick by which all American writers (and most especially Southern writers) have been judged ever since. "The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst," said Faulkner's contemporary Flannery O'Connor in 1960, "makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down" (Mystery and Manners, New York: Noonday Press, 1957; p. 45). Nor does Faulkner haunt merely the American imagination: the French saw his brilliance even earlier than his own countrymen, and in Latin America, Faulkner is still acknowledged as a source of inspiration by writers such as literary giant Gabriel García Márquez.
William Falkner (the "u" in his name a later addition) was born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi. Young William was named for his colorful great-grandfather, affectionately dubbed the Old Colonel, who was killed in a duel before his great-grandson's birth and who would loom large in the family imagination for generations to come. The Falkners moved to Oxford, Mississippi, when William was five, and during his youth there Falkner would meet two people who would remain important in his life: Estelle Oldham, his childhood sweetheart and future wife, and Phil Stone, a friend and source of encouragement in Falkner's writing.
In 1918, after Estelle married a young Mississippi lawyer named Cornell Franklin, Phil Stone invited Falkner to join him in Connecticut. Faulkner worked briefly as a clerk at the Winchester Repeating Arms Company (an incident chiefly important as the first time Faulkner's name was spelled with the "u") before deciding to join the RAF. Faulkner lied on his application and affected a British accent to join, but before he could finish his training, World War I ended. By December of 1918, William Faulkner was back in Oxford, bragging of his many war injuries and adventures.
Although he never finished high school, Faulkner entered the University of Mississippi the next year. He didn't stay at the university very long, but he published a few pieces in the campus newspaper and even had his first poem published in The New Republic. After a brief stint working in a bookshop in New York, he returned to the University of Mississippi, but not as a student this time: he became the university's worst postmaster ever. While he delivered very little mail, Faulkner did read a lot and play a lot of cards. He agreed to resign after a postal inspector's visit in 1924. 1924 was also the year that Phil Stone was able to arrange for the publication of a volume of Faulkner's poetry called The Marble Faun.
By 1925, Faulkner had arrived in New Orleans and joined a literary circle that included Sherwood Anderson, who would offer him valuable advice on his writing. Faulkner wrote essays and sketches in New Orleans, and also his first novel, Soldier’s Pay. Faulkner traveled in Europe, but returned to the U.S. to write his next novels, Mosquitoes, published in 1927, and Sartoris, published in 1929.
It was also in 1929 that Faulkner married the now-divorced Estelle Oldham Franklin, and from then on, he would face the difficulty of earning enough money to support Estelle and her two children by Cornell Franklin. As the years passed, his financial responsibilities would grow, as he and Estelle had a daughter and his mother was widowed. He also purchased a dilapidated antebellum house he called Rowan Oak, which added to his debts. Because of his need for money, Faulkner frequently published short stories for quick cash, and he worked on a number of Hollywood screenplays. He also claimed that Sanctuary, one of his most controversial and bestselling novels, was also written out of simple financial need.
But while Faulkner was working at odd jobs and writing pieces with an eye towards his dwindling bank account, he also embarked on unprecedented creative period in which he would write a string of groundbreaking novels for the sheer joy of writing them. The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), Absalom! Absalom! (1936), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down, Moses (1942), to name only a few of the most stunning works, were written during this burst of literary brilliance, a feat unmatched by Faulkner in later years and indeed by writers to this day.
Faulkner wrote in the introduction to the 1933 edition of The Sound and the Fury that the experience of writing the novel was different from anything he wrote before or after:
I wrote this book and learned to read. I had learned a little about writing from Soldier’s Pay — how to approach language, words: not with seriousness so much, as an essayist does, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite; even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions. But when I finished The Sound and the Fury I discovered that there is actually something to which the shabby term Art not only can, but must, be applied. (http://www.usask.ca/english/faulkner/)
The novel touched him so perhaps because of how he felt about Caddy Compson, the novel's beautiful and doomed young girl whose story is told through the eyes of her three brothers. From the top of her head to the seat of her muddy drawers, she was his "heart's darling," as he would later call her (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/enam312/wfhp.html). The Sound and the Fury may have been art in Faulkner's eyes, but it was also a labor of love and a singular experience because, as he later claimed, in Caddy "he had already put perhaps the only thing in literature which would ever move me very much" (http://www.usask.ca/english/faulkner/).
Faulkner's work was recognized in 1949 by the Nobel Prize committee, and in 1950 he traveled to Stockholm to accept the award. He gave there what many consider to be the best acceptance speech ever given at the Nobel ceremony (http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-speech.html). In following years, Faulkner would accept many more awards and travel widely at the request of the State Department. He would continue to travel until his daughter Jill married and his first grandchild was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, at which point he accepted a position as writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia and split his time between Oxford and Charlottesville. During these years, he finished the two remaining parts of the trilogy he began in The Hamlet in 1940, The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959), as well as working on The Reivers (1962). The Reivers was to be Faulkner's final novel, published after Faulkner's death of a heart attack at age sixty-four.
William Faulkner said, in his oft-quoted Nobel speech, about the essential quality necessary to a writer:
[The writer] must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.
Faulkner was fearless in just such a way during his writing career, and led those who have followed by example.
Summary:
The Sound and the Fury is a novel about the Compson family told in four parts. The first narrator, Benjy, is the most difficult to understand because the reader discovers he has a mental disability of some kind. His childlike impressions of the world around him mix present and past, and consist of fragments which in and of themselves don't tell a coherent story. The fact that several members of his family share the same names, and that Benjy's name was changed from Benjy to Maury when he was a boy, makes figuring out who's who even more challenging. It is April 7, 1928, and Benjy's thirty-third birthday, but Benjy's mind ranges rapidly from the events of that day (the loss of a quarter, a birthday cake) back to other events, such as the day his grandmother Damuddy died when Benjy was a child. Benjy is preoccupied with memories of his sister Caddy, who seems to be missing from the present-day descriptions and to be the center of Benjy's world even after she has disappeared from the action. Readers are also able to piece together who the members of the Compson family are from how they interact with Benjy. Caroline Compson, his peevish mother, treats him as a burden, but neither she nor Jason Compson, his father, seems to have much to do with Benjy. Benjy has two other siblings other than his adored sister Caddy: Quentin, who seems frequently to be studying in Benjy's memories and to have a female namesake in some present-day passages, and Jason, an unpleasant, greedy tattletale as a child, who is not a bit better as an adult. Responsibility for taking care of Benjy is largely left to the family's black servants. By 1928, it is chiefly Dilsey, the Compsons' motherly black cook, and young Luster who are left with the task of keeping Benjy quiet and out of the way of the rest of the family.
The second narrator is Quentin, Benjy's brother, whom we follow through the day of June 2, 1910. Quentin is a Harvard student, and is, as his classmate Spoade derisively calls him, the "champion of dames" (p. 191), a quality that brings Quentin to despair time and time again. On that June day in 1910, trying to help a little girl find her way home gets him punched and taken into police custody. He takes a beating from his glamorous and far more athletic classmate Gerald, too, when, after Gerald brags of his sexual exploits and makes disparaging remarks about women, Quentin feels compelled to take a swing at him. Most damaging of all were Quentin's attempts to protect his sister Caddy, events which, although they happened in the past, are as real and as raw as the black eye and bloodied face he gets as Gerald's hands. Like Benjy, he is preoccupied with thoughts of Caddy, and in particular with her sexual indiscretions. The pasture Benjy loved was sold to pay for Quentin's education at Harvard and a lavish wedding for the doomed, pregnant Caddy, although the groom and the father were not one and the same. Quentin makes careful preparations, packing his clothes, writing letters, and buying flat irons, muddles through his misadventures with the lost girl and Gerald, and, as we suspect here and learn definitively later, he drowns himself.
Jason is the narrator of the third section, which begins April 6, 1928. Jason snarls, swindles and swears his way through a day of working at the country store in Jefferson and chasing his seventeen-year-old niece Quentin around town. Jason is obsessed with money and a thoroughly bitter, nasty person. We learn from him that after Benjy chased some little girls down the street he had him castrated and that for years he has stolen the money that Caddy sends for Quentin. He bullies Quentin and the rest of the household, but Quentin rebels, skipping school and running around town with various men. On this particular day, she is sneaking around with a man from a traveling show, and she and the showman lead Jason five miles out of town, trick him and let the air out of his tire.
The final section is third-person omniscient narration and follows Dilsey on Easter Sunday, April 8, 1928, as she deals with Mrs. Compson's complaints, Luster's inattention to his chores, and Jason's usual unpleasantness. When Jason realizes that Quentin is missing and his room has been broken into, he makes the agonizing discovery that she has not only run off with the showman, but taken his secret stash of money with her. He chases the traveling show to Mottson, but Quentin isn't there. Dilsey takes Benjy with her to church, and then sends him to ride with Luster to the graveyard, where they encounter the defeated Jason.
Questions:
While answers are provided, there is no presumption that you have been given the last word. Readers bring their own personalities to the books that they are examining. What is obvious and compelling to one reader may be invisible to the next. The questions that have been selected provide one reasonable access to the text; the answers are intended to give you examples of what a reflective reader might think. The variety of possible answers is one of the reasons we find book discussions such a rewarding activity.
Why are the narrators presented in this order?
Faulkner begins his story in a way guaranteed to be incomprehensible to the reader at first, and for many readers, for a good long while after that. Why start with Benjy? Why begin the novel with a lengthy section in which things won't quite make sense?
Many of the novel's chief themes and events are present already in Benjy's section, although we may not recognize it until later. It serves almost the same purpose as foreshadowing in a more conventional novel, allowing the author to pique the reader's interest and add suspense. We want to know why it is that Quentin keeps changing gender (or could that be two Quentins?) and we wonder what it is Benjy cries about when he changes his clothes (p. 84). Most of all, we want to know more about Caddy, the light of Benjy's life.
Quentin's chapter illuminates some of the key events of 1910, namely Caddie's marriage and his own impending suicide. Because he is so tormented and on the verge of taking his own life, this section too is difficult to understand at some points. When he announces to his father that he has committed incest (p. 88), we struggle to figure out if that is actually the case. We try to piece together the significance of all the clocks, watches, and other markers of time and what they mean to Quentin. While this second chapter may fulfill some of the promises of the first chapter, lots of information is still missing, in part because Quentin dies in 1910 and the Benjy chapter takes place in 1928, and in part because Quentin's mind is so disordered by his despair.
Jason is the most horrifyingly clear, if still unreliable, narrator of the three. All at once we understand that Jason has had Benjy castrated and means to send him to Jackson as soon as he is able. We understand that Quentin is the name of both his dead brother and his much-hated niece. He makes it clear that his brother Quentin did indeed drown himself, in case we held out any hope that we misunderstood those flat irons in his pockets and the walk to the river, and reveals more of Caddy's unhappy story. The brutality of Jason's actions and his language horrifies us all the more because we encounter it after we have shared Benjy's confusions and Quentin's anguish; after the fineness of those sentiments, Jason's coarseness hits with the power of a wrecking ball.
The shift to traditional narration at the end of the novel, instead of the difficult stream-of-consciousness perceptions of three main characters, is a dramatic change in the novel. We get a panoramic view of the Compsons, and specifically of the family's ruin. Jason, the last Compson, is financially ruined and humiliated, and as he intends to remain a life-long bachelor, the line will end rather ingloriously with him. Presenting those final events through his perspective, however, would leave us with an ending too bleak and bitter to bear; it is only when we look beyond Jason and his siblings that we begin to see where hope lies in the final chapter.
Dilsey grounds it at the end. Her activities on Easter morning bring us back to the world of work, devotion, and stability. If we don't want to see Quentin's escape with the showman as a continuation of the family and of Caddy, at least in some oblique way, then the demise of the Compson family is hardly the end of all things; much of what was good in the Compson house continues in Dilsey. As she attends church on Easter, a day which signifies hope, renewal and rebirth, it moves the novel from the bleakness of the fate of the Compson siblings Caddy, Quentin, Jason and Benjy, to an emphasis on what endures.
How are the Compson brothers alike?
All of the Compson children suffer the neglect of their parents. Caroline Compson's martyred pose of constant suffering places her squarely in the center of her private drama, and except for seeing her children as a further burden to her, they don't really have parts to play. Jason may be her favorite, but even he is simply meant to play audience to her performances. Her husband Jason is almost completely absent from Benjy's section, and remembered only briefly and bitterly in his son Jason's, so the few times we see interaction between Mr. Compson and any of his children is in his speeches to Quentin. Otherwise, he seems to leave the family to the care of Dilsey and to Caroline's histrionics, and retires to the comfort of his decanter. Nor are his pronouncements to Quentin of any real value; to the contrary, the contradictions between his father's genteel Old South philosophy of life and honor and family and the actual life he leads bother Quentin quite a lot. None of the Compson sons has a healthy parent/child relationship, and they must rely on substitute mothers like Caddy or Dilsey.
Beyond simply being brought up in the same house by the same parents, the three brothers share some key fixations, chief among them being Caddy and her sexuality. Benjy's section is filled with Caddy, and his day is structured around when Caddy will appear at the gate, or when she will lull him to sleep. She tends him as a mother, and as his own mother won't, despite the fact she's quite a tomboy. Benjy doesn't seem to have any sexual thoughts about anything at all, but almost instinctively he feels threatened by Caddy's budding sexuality. In one case, his alarm is at a symbol he surely can't understand or relate to Caddy's future sexual misbehavior: he cries when he sees the muddy seat of Caddy's drawers as she climbs up the tree (p. 21; 44). As a teenager Caddy has to give her new perfume to Dilsey as a present because Benjy is so upset when his Caddy, who always smells like trees, suddenly smells like something else, something grown-up (pp. 48-9). While his grasp of Caddy's activities and the danger inherent in them is slight at best, he seems to react to any sign of them with alarm.
Quentin's obsession with Caddy's virginity, or lack thereof, is clear on nearly every page of his chapter. The reasons he feels threatened are far different from Benjy or Jason's (see question 3), but Caddy is as much the center of his world as she is Benjy's. Jason's case is somewhat different. His hatred of women (or of all women he can't buy, as he does Lorraine, the Memphis prostitute) is universal, but his sister and her daughter seem to have a special place in his disdain because their crimes against him, as he sees it, are sexual and reflect badly on him. Like Quentin, Jason seems concerned with family honor, at least in his hypocritical way, but more than that Quentin and Jason both seem uncomfortable with matters of sexuality in general. Jason only has sex with prostitutes (and as far as we know, only Lorraine) and Quentin never has sex at all. Jason has Benjy castrated, ostensibly because of the scare he gave the little girl he chased, but possibly because of the restrictions all the Compson men place on sexuality. Caddy is the exception to the family rule, and the object of their obsession, not coincidentally.
Has Quentin committed incest? Is that what drives him to suicide?
Quentin has probably not committed incest. There is surely something more intense in Caddy and Quentin's relationship than is common. Quentin does say outright that he has committed incest (p. 88). That statement comes early in the chapter, however, and other statements made throughout the rest of the chapter seem to indicate that he just wishes that it were true — but for an unusual reason. He doesn't wish they had been lovers because he lusts after Caddy, but because he wants the two of them to be forever damned and cast out, so that they have only each other: "Because if it were just to hell; if that were all of it. Finished. If things just finished themselves. Nobody else there but her and me. If we could just have done something so dreadful that they would have fled hell except us" (p. 90). Actual incest seems unlikely, however jealous Quentin seems of Dalton Ames, and however eager to confess to incest.
Quentin does not survive his loss of innocence, an innocence lost when Caddy loses her virginity and events spin out of their control. He has romantic notions of Southern womanhood, and of the obligations he has to uphold family honor as a Southern man. These are ideas planted by his father, who apparently doesn't realize how important they will become to him. Caddy is more than the sister he adores, his sole companion in their frequently unpleasant family life. She is symbolic, and furthermore, Caddy's loss of honor is a challenge he as a Southern man must answer. He fails miserably over and over again, often taking a beating, as he tries to defend Caddy. First he challenges Dalton (pp. 181-86), then Herbert (pp. 123-26), then he attempts to rescue Caddy by claiming incest (p. 88), and then he fails Caddy's double, the dirt-covered little immigrant girl and takes a beating from her brother (pp. 159-66), and he challenges Gerald, whose coarse remarks about his seductions of women sting Quentin almost as if he had seduced Caddy herself (pp. 188-92). Quentin's sense of himself, from his idealism and innocence to his ability to uphold the code of honor he believes must mean something, is wrecked.
Why is Quentin obsessed with time?
Quentin mentions the watch his father gave him as he starts his chapter, and from then on, watches, clock towers, and asking for the time are mentioned over and over again. The key to interpreting his fixation comes at the end of his chapter and just before his suicide (pp. 202-5), and perhaps not surprisingly, it turns out to be related to Caddy. He remembers a conversation about Caddy's lost virginity and his reaction to it with his father:
. . . you are not lying now either but you are still blind to what is in yourself to that part of general truth the sequence of natural events and their causes which shadows every mans brow even benjys you are not thinking of finitude you are contemplating an apotheosis in which a temporary state of mind will become symmetrical above the flesh and aware both of itself and of the flesh it will not quite discard you will not even be dead and i temporary and he you cannot bear to think that someday it will no longer hurt you like this now (p. 203)
Quentin becomes stuck on the word temporary, repeating it. His father insists that his anguish is a fleeting thing that he can no more hold onto than youth, innocence, beauty — or Caddy. The first throes of despair are never lasting, nor even true despair, his father insists.
. . . and i temporary and he it is hard believing to think that a love or a sorrow is a bond purchased without design and which matures willy-nilly and is recalled without warning to be replaced by whatever issue the gods happen to be floating at the time no you will not do that until you come to believe that even she was not quite worth despair perhaps (p. 203)
Quentin cannot bear to envision a world in which he will feel any other way, in which he might assume his father's cynicism. The world without Caddy and without honor is the bleakest thing Quentin can imagine, until he is faced with the specter of a world in which Caddy and honor are meaningless.
Why is Jason so mean?
Jason Compson is bitter, hypocritical, and selfish. We see him steal money from his niece Quentin, torment Caddy with only a glimpse of her baby daughter for the $100 she paid him (pp. 232-35), burn up two free tickets to the show Luster wants so desperately to see right in front of the boy's face (pp. 294-95), and disparage women, blacks, Jews. He calls Benjy the "Great American Gelding" (p. 304) and can't wait to ship him off to Jackson and be rid of him. It's hard not to ask what motivates a man to behave the way Jason does, with no love or respect for anyone other than himself and his only joys in greed and hurting others.
Jason accounts for his bitterness quite simply: he was slighted in his father's plans when the family sold Benjy's pasture, and he was cheated out of his promised job at the bank. The family sells Benjy's beloved pasture in order to finance Quentin's Harvard education and pay for Caddy's wedding. Benjy's needs are overlooked and Jason's too, although Caddy's fiancé Herbert promises him a job at a bank in Indianapolis. When Herbert abandons Caddy after discovering her pregnancy, Jason's hopes for a career in banking are dashed.
There are signs, though, that Jason wasn't transformed into the hateful, venal character he is by these developments. As a child we see him off by himself (p. 21) and when he does interact with the other children, it's usually to tattle (p. 27). He cuts up Benjy's dolls, perhaps with a child's incomprehension, and perhaps not (p. 74). His hands are usually in his pockets and Versh believes he's going to be rich because "He holding his money all the time" (p. 41). Quentin tells us about a money-making scheme of Jason's as a boy in which he and another boy sold kites, with Jason as the company treasurer (p. 107). He seems to be well on his way to becoming the Jason Compson we meet in the third section of the novel, even if the other characters aren't interested enough in him to give us a clear portrait of him.
And perhaps that is important: he exists on the periphery of the story's first two sections and the Compsons' lives, at least until Caddy leaves and Quentin dies. It is possible to feel a little sad for a lonely little boy whose siblings leave him out, whose mother is a raving hypochondriac and father an alcoholic, and who cries over his supper when his grandmother is ill: "'He does it every night since Damuddy was sick and he cant sleep with her.' Caddy said. 'Cry baby'" (p. 30). Perhaps that early powerlessness and isolation did affect Jason in some way.
Ultimately, there isn't a fully convincing rationale for Jason's behavior. He may have been affected in some way by the problems in the Compson household, but none of that really accounts for the cruelty he shows everyone in the story, even his mother, who fawns over him in her passive-aggressive way, and Dilsey, who would have been almost a mother to him in place of the perennially headachy Caroline. If there is a consolation in the novel, it is not in understanding why Jason is as he is, but in seeing him defeated at the end, ferried home in shame, injured, bereft of his $3000, in the wagon alongside his brother Benjy.
How are Jason and Caroline Compson important in the novel?
One difference between the chapters narrated by the three Compson sons is the portrait that emerges of their parents. In Benjy's chapter, Caroline Compson makes an occasional appearance to moan about a headache or about how Benjy is a punishment, or to make demands of Dilsey in her wheedling way, but she is nearly absent in Quentin's chapter. Her one significant appearance is in a scathing passage about wishing she were rid of all her children but Jason (pp. 116-19), which to be fair might or might not be something she actually said, but only Quentin's impression of her feelings: "I can take Jason and go where we are not known I'll go down on my knees and pray for the absolution of my sins that he may escape this curse try to forget that the others ever were" (p. 119). In his despair, Quentin thinks to himself, "if I’d just had a mother so I could say Mother Mother" (p. 197). While Quentin seems almost persecuted by his father's tendentious statements and expectations of what he will achieve, Quentin seems to feel he has no mother at all. He is confined to a world of male expectations of power, honor and achievement, and that is what he wishes he and Caddy could escape and leave behind them.
Benjy's world is the world of the powerless. He himself is the most powerless of all, of course, unable to feed or dress himself without help and constantly tended, but he is almost always surrounded by the black servants and women. His parents seem to wish him out of sight, and the role of caretaker and protector is taken on first by Caddy and later by a series of servants who will watch him (and sometimes torment him). The fact that he has been rendered impotent reiterates Benjy's powerlessness. He is consigned to a place outside even the worlds of male and female, of no real interest to either his father or mother.
Jason is Mrs. Compson's pet, but her attention is of a very unsavory sort. Her passive-aggressive behavior seems docile and obedient, but in point of fact she still has some control over what he does. He has not been able to send Benjy to Jackson, for example, which is something he'd like to do. It's clear he'd love to be rid of the servants, Dilsey in particular, but he has not been able to do that either. In his way, he is emasculated by the women in the house, be it Quentin's misbehavior, Dilsey's challenges, or Mrs. Compson's sniveling, and only appears to be in control. Mr. Compson seems to have ignored him, while he lived. Perhaps Quentin's death and Caddy's disappearance, combined with his increasing reliance on alcohol, kept Mr. Compson from giving Jason the kinds of speeches he gave Quentin, or it could be that his wife's favoritism, or perhaps Jason's very nature put him off. We know only that Jason feels he was left out when Benjy's pasture was sold and that he was not given his due. As desperately as he wants to inhabit that male world his father invited Quentin into, he is condemned by his own vile nature, and perhaps his own miserable luck, to fail miserably. At the end of the novel, he is sitting with Benjy in the wagon, being driven back home by a servant, after having been robbed and having had his head bashed. If he is not as powerless as Benjy, for the moment, he seems it.
Why did Faulkner call this novel The Sound and the Fury?
The phrase "the sound and the fury" comes from a famous soliloquy from Shakespeare's Macbeth:
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth V.v. 19-28
This speech delivered by Macbeth in Shakespeare's play resonates with Shakespeare's novel in several ways. The tragic overtones of this speech, delivered after the character Macbeth has learned of his wife's death, are perhaps appropriate for a novel that tells of the death of one brother, the ruin of a sister, and the demise of a family. The emphasis on time is significant, given Quentin's preoccupation with it. Most striking is the soliloquy's last sentence. It is an easy thing to assume that the "idiot" who tells a tale in this novel is Benjy, but that may not be the only possible reading. Quentin and Jason may not have Benjy's disabilities, but either one (or both) could be seen as foolish or idiotic at points in the story. Nor should we neglect the possibility that Faulkner is taking a sideways glance at the business of writing novels.
It is important that Faulkner chose just the "sound and fury" part of this quotation as his title. He does not include the subsequent phrase, "Signifying nothing," which may show that there is meaning to life and the tale, if we are able to discover it. He does not focus on "dusty death" or any of the other bleak images of the passage, but on the stuff of his tale/life's tale: sound and fury. Whether we take that to mean communication and emotion, or something else, the focus is on the meaning, rather than meaninglessness.
Web References:
William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury: A Hypertext Edition
http://www.usask.ca/english/faulkner/
The text itself, plus Faulkner's 1933 introductions and appendix, useful critical works, and primary sources such as Macbeth, from which the title is derived. There are fascinating, fun and wholly unnecessary visuals, such as a color-coded representation of Benjy's section to clarify the chronology, a map of the Compson estate, and images of manuscript pages too.