The Sound and the Fury

Faulkner traces the slow collapse of the Compson family, once proud Mississippi gentry, through four narrators whose voices could hardly be more different. The first belongs to Benjy, who has no sense of time; the second to Quentin, a Harvard student unable to let go of his sister Caddy; the third to the bitter, grasping Jason; and the last settles on Dilsey, the Black servant who holds the ruined household together. The fractured, stream of consciousness telling asks readers to assemble the story themselves, and the effort is part of its power. The title comes from Macbeth’s speech about a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury. This free PDF and EPUB edition brings one of American modernism’s defining novels to any reader.