Critical essays reflecting a variety of schools of criticism - Notes on the contributing critics, a chronology of the author's life, and an index - An introductory essay by Harold Bloom.
The first major novel by William Faulkner, published in 1929. The novel is set in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Miss., in the early 20th century. It describes the decay and fall of the aristocratic Compson family, and, implicitly, of an entire social order, from four different points of view.
The first three sections are presented from the perspectives of the three Compson sons: Benjy, an "idiot"; Quentin, a suicidal Harvard freshman; and Jason, the eldest. Each section is focused primarily on a sister who has married and left home. The fourth section comments on the other three as the Compsons' black servants, whose chief virtue is their endurance, reveal the family's moral decline. With The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner for the first time incorporated several challenging and sophisticated stylistic techniques, including interior monologues and stream-of-consciousness narrative. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
