THE SOUND AND THE FURY
(April Seventh, 1928)

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

From An Introduction for The Sound and the Fury, The Southern Review by William Faulkner:

I wrote this book and learned to read. [... ] [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. I discovered then that I had gone through all that I had ever read, from Henry James through Henty to newspaper murders, without making any distinction or digesting any of it, as a moth or a goat might. After The Sound and The Fury and without heeding to open another book and in a series of delayed repercussions like summer thunder, I discovered the Flauberts and Dostoievskys and Conrads whose books I had read ten years ago. With The Sound and the Fury I learned to read and quit reading, since I have read nothing since.

Nor do I seem to have learned anything since.

Characters
Jason Compson III, Father
Caroline Compson, Mother
Quentin Compson III, their first son
Candace "Caddy" Compson, their daughter
Quentin, Caddy's illegitimate daughter
Jason Compson IV, their second son
Benjamin "Benjy" Compson, their third son (born "Maury")
Maury Bascomb, Caroline's brother
Dilsey Gibson, the Compson's cook
Roskus Gibson, her husband
Versh Gibson, their first son
T.P. Gibson, their second son
Frony Gibson, their daughter
Luster Gibson, her son
Mr. and Mrs. Patterson, the Compson's neighbors
A golfer
His caddie
Two washerwomen

  

The company relied heavily on www.usask.ca/english/faulkner/ a hypertext version of "April Seventh, 1928," for help with decoding the chronology of the story.

The edition of The Sound and the Fury used in this production is the First Vintage International Edition, October 1990.

Publisher's Note: This edition of The Sound and the Fury follows the text as corrected in 1984.
The text is based on a comparison - under the direction of Noel Polk - of the first edition and Faulkner's original manuscript
and carbon typescript.


From Faulkner at Nagano, Ed. Robert A. Jelliffe; on writing The Sound and the Fury:

Q: Would you tell us something about the time you wrote the first section? It seems to be so complicated, and I wonder if you wrote it just as you did The Wild Palms.

F: That began as a short story, it was a story without plot, of some children being sent away from the house during the grandmother's funeral. They were too young to be told what was going on and they saw things only incidentally to the childish games they were playing, which was the lugubrious matter of removing the corpse from the house, etc., and then the idea struck me to see how much more I could have got out of the idea of the blind, self-centeredness of innocence, typified by children if one of those children had been truly innocent, that is, an idiot. So the idiot was born and then I became interested in the relationship of the idiot to the world that he was in but would never be able to cope with and just where could he get the tenderness, the help, to shield him in his innocence. I mean 'innocence' in the sense that God had stricken him blind at birth, that is, mindless at birth, there was nothing he could ever do about it.

... I wrote that same story four times. None of them were right, but I had anguished so much that I could not throw any of it away and start over, so I printed [the novel] in the four sections. That was not a deliberate tour de force at all, the book just grew that way. That I was still trying to tell one story which moved me very much and each time I failed, but I had put so much anguish into it that I couldn't throw it away, like the mother that had four bad children, that she would have been better off if they all had been eliminated, but she couldn't relinquish any of them. And that's the reason I have the most tenderness for that book, because it failed four times.

From The Tragedy of Macbeth V.v. by William Shakespeare:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow
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 duty 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.

 

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