The Sound and the Fury

The Sound and the Fury is William Faulkner’s masterpiece, depicting the decline of the Compson family, a once-aristocratic Southern household in post–Civil War America. Told through the fragmented perspectives of four characters—including the mentally disabled Benjy and the tormented Quentin—the novel employs stream-of-consciousness, nonlinear time, and shifting narrators to explore themes of memory, race, class, and the disintegration of identity. A landmark of modernist literature.