James Baquet

    Few authors create entire fictional worlds, as J.R.R. Tolkien made Middle Earth, or C.S. Lewis imagined Narnia.

    Then there’s the Yoknapatawpha County of William Faulkner (1897-1962). In some ways vastly different, it is nevertheless as fully conceived — and in some ways as bizarre — as those more fantastic places. And while those authors peopled their worlds with wizards and elves, hobbits, orcs, and other semi-human creatures, Faulkner filled his with extreme examples of Southern “types.”

    In “The Sound and the Fury” he chronicles the decline of the Compson family, Southern aristocrats who would show up again in “Absalom, Absalom!” and various short stories. Over the novel’s 30 years they lose their financial status, their religious beliefs, and the respect of their community. Some family members even lose their lives.

    The book is divided into four parts. Each of the first three focuses on a different Compson. The first section, set on April 7, 1928, is told from the point of view of Benjy, a mentally retarded Compson boy. He reflects back over the previous 30 years in a disjointed style, reminiscent of James Joyce’s work. The second part looks back to June 2, 1910, and contains the thoughts of Benjy’s older brother Quentin as he descends into madness and suicide. Again, the words of the narrative become increasingly jumbled as the young man loses his grip. The third part returns to April 6, 1928, and the straightforward point of view of a third brother, Jason, who has become the family’s breadwinner after their father’s death.

    Woven throughout these sections are the brothers’ thoughts and varying obsessions with their sister Caddy — who became pregnant out of wedlock and shamed the family — and her promiscuous daughter Miss Quentin.

    In the fourth section, set on April 8, 1928, Faulkner employs a third-person narrator, looking into the thoughts of various characters, but focusing to the greatest extent on a black servant named Dilsey, the matriarch of the family who serves the Compsons.

    Faulkner added an appendix to the book in 1945, which ends with Dilsey’s summation of the family’s fate: “They endured.”

    Vocabulary

    Which word above means:

    1. populated, filled with people

    2. of loose sexual morals

    3. mixed up

    4. strange

    5. review of facts

    6. disconnected, incoherent

    7. reminding one, similar to

    8. lasted, continued

    9. members of the upper class

    10. female head of a family