Reading The Sound and the Fury

The Sound and the Fury, published in 1929, is a notoriously challenging novel because of Faulkner's use of the stream of consciousness technique, a complex literary style that allows an author to make characters' thoughts always apparent while they are narrating. In the case of The Sound and the Fury, the first section of the book is narrated in a stream of consciousness style by Benjy Compson, a mentally retarded thirty-three-year-old whose thoughts routinely skip backwards and forwards in time, often jarring even advanced readers. Even though the first section is considered by many to be the most difficult, the later sections also present major hurdles to readers. The guide to The Sound and the Fury is broken into four parts, one for each section of the novel.