The Sound and the Fury

 by William Faulkner

It has been written that this obscure way of telling a story was the only way to do it. In any case the result is this masterpiece.

Born in Mississippi in 1897 and having lived there most of his life, Faulkner published The Sound and the Fury in 1929 and was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.

He used the stream of consciousness among other narrative methods to tell his story, which adds to the value but also the obscurity of the book.

Stream of consciousness is a narrative mode or method that attempts to describe the various thoughts of the heroes in a novel and the feelings which pass through their minds.

The novel is separated into 4 parts:

The first part takes place on April 7^th 1928 and depicts the perplexed thoughts in the mind of Benjy, a 33-year-old congenital imbecile who has no sense of time. The author helps the reader to understand the change of time by changing from roman to italics type.

The second part is narrated by his brother Quentin during his last day alive before he commits suicide in 1910.

In the third and fourth parts he comes back to 1928  and the story starts coming out in the light little by little. The strange thing is that as a reader you still enjoy the seeming rigmarole.

After you finish reading you feel like you want to go through it again. And this is not only to uncover hidden parts but also to enjoy.