The Sound and the Fury Themes

Capturing the complexity of human thought production and human memory, Faulkner quickly became one of the leading figures of American Modernism. In The Sound and the Fury, multiple narrators produc...

This is a novel about family – but more than that, it’s about a family in a freefall. An alcoholic father, a worthless uncle, a whining mother, and four curious children: the Compsons s...

In this novel, innocence comes in strange forms. There’s the mother who preaches a sort of rigid withdrawal from life, a son whose attempts to speak result in forced castration, and a son so...

For the characters of The Sound and the Fury, sin is almost always related to sex. In fact, at times the two are synonymous. A daughter’s blossoming sexuality becomes the tipping point which...

Ah, home sweet home. A falling-apart house in a small Mississippi town becomes the center of this novel. As we see, however, even the land the house stands on is disintegrating: pasture land is sol...

Your crummy fate is always easier to take if you blame it on someone else, right? Well, if you agree, this book’s for you. We’ve counted so many different layers and permutations of bla...

Trying to figure out what’s right and wrong leads an entire family to rip itself apart, individual by individual. Faulkner creates character after character who try to figure out how to play...

Setting a black family and a white family together in the post-Reconstruction South, Faulkner makes racial relations an inevitable center of the novel. What does it mean to be white in the North? W...

For the characters in The Sound and the Fury, memories of the past dominate the present day. Revolving around Caddy, the runaway daughter of the family, the novel works (and re-works and re-works)...

If virginity is at the heart of Southern values, then growing up and exploring sexual identities becomes a pretty difficult business – at least, it is for the Compsons. Tangled in the sense o...