A Critical Analysis of The Sound of The Fury by William Faulkner

From the beginning, there have been many critics of Faulkner's books, especially The Sound of the Fury. Critics' perspectives have mainly centered on both thematic issues and durational approaches. Nonetheless, critics have identified the intellectual effects it had on American literature in the twentieth century. The mechanical oddity in The Sound of The Fury needs consideration due to the extremely problematic responses he gives to the questions. This paper would include a critical review of Sartre's discussion of Faulknerian time in The Sound of the Fury. Sartre’s foremost concern is the reaction of the characters to the time limits. Time is personal evidence that Sartre explains as “The story does not unfold; we discover it under each word” (265). Faulkner has not only broken up the time in his story, but he has also scrambled the pieces. This is the technical oddity that the readers easily identify in this work. In this way, we are tempted to find guide marks thereby reestablishing the chronology on our own. On this, Sartre is right in his suggestion that the reader better grasps the meaning of the Compson past owing to the tensions between time and the characters. This is brought out from Quentin breaking his watch “gives us access to a time without clocks” (Sartre, 266). I agree with his argument that, for the Compsons, the future does not exist. What happens to them is that the present is continuously renewed. According to Sartre, things of the past invade the future, leaving the present riddled with gaps. In this way, both the present and the past are compressed into unity where “the present moves along in the shadow...and reappears only when it itself is passed” (Sartre, 266). Faulkner is more undecided and more individual in The Sound of The Fury. Sometimes he aptly disguises the present that moves along in the shadow.

In Faulkner’s characters, emotional constellations are the building blocks of history. In fact, history is a resurfacing of personal experience as defined by the emotional constellations. This implies that no other perspective exists other than that of the heart. This view makes the past to become “an obsession” (Sartre, 268). I think that time is a cavernous, confining tomb of the past. This is the concept upon which the past realities are consecrated and mourned to have once existed. I feel Sartre could have used his very much turned investigation toward a new understanding of Jason, like Caddy, who is mostly labeled as absolutely unconcerned with the past by critics. I am also convinced that the past for all the Compsons is driven by honor, just as Quentin's. In fact, both Jason and Quentin are powerfully compelled by memory. A fanatical mission to compensate for the time lost to broken promises commands his reality. His disdain of Miss Quentin and his theft from her isn't quite recently constant ill will or stinginess, yet a sign of his persistently developing hatred of Caddy, whom he faults for every one of his inconveniences. Each savagery, each dollar enables him to assert what he feels would have been his. At the point when Quentin takes Jason's cash, she destroys to his interest in getting even. However, this is not to suggest that there is a clear line separating these polarities. Sartre’s influential article lays proper emphasis on the Faulknerian durational time (231). There is a sinking in this present. There is not any form of progression in the wake of Faulkner. There is nothing to come of the future since the present has not made the possibility of the future apparent. Caroline and Jason share an essential characteristic-self-pity. Jason and his mother blame others for the troubles befalling them. “I never had time to be. I never had time to go to Harvard or drink myself into the ground. I had to work” (Faulkner, 114). Being present should mean appearing for no reason and then sinking in. As I pointed out earlier, the past is a conception of the heart. My interpretation of the time is that Faulkner reveals events only after they are over. Everything has already happened in The Sound and the Fury. This implies that the past takes some super reality, and thus unchangeable. In this regard, the present is helpless before the past. There are so many gaps in present that the events of the past come to invade it. There is some despair on time amongst the Compsons that we see in the last paragraph. “The last note sounded. At last, it stopped vibrating, and the darkness was still again” (Faulkner, 113).

In conclusion, always indebted to the subjectivity of memory, we get the point that without memory, time passes away as meager more than a sterile sequence of events. In scholarly and abstract history, time gains its importance from Sartre’s fact that time is a personal consciousness. In Faulkner's fiction, even as order falls flat, the duration is a centerpiece. Such is the situation in The Sound and the Fury. For the Compson family, history as a memory for sure assures for their section from respectable to unfortunate. Along these lines, it is suitable that some critics, including Sartre, have concentrated on time and memory in their examination of The Sound and the Fury. He attempts to explain the dynamic of Compson by looking into the time conceptions. He dissects the interconnectedness of the present and the past given that the future has already forsaken the distressed Compsons. In addition, Sartre makes an apt case for time as the duration in the experiences of the Compsons. In fact, time does not escape in Faulkner’s fiction. There are two forms of time showcased in The Sound and the Fury. One of them is that of individual consciousness speaking to lived memory, and the other is the temporal chronology. Unfortunately, the latter is frustratingly disrupted. I can argue that Falkner’s characters are nailed to the cross of the past. This implies that there is no present from which the past can be recaptured. The idea Sartre brings out here is that the Faulknerian characters are living in a present that has already been eaten up by the past. For someone like Quentin, the past is extra-temporal meaning that it exists in the present. They are the past and not determined by the past. In this way, destiny psychologically dominates them. I am forced to observe that Faulkner, just like his philosophy, is a nihilist. The hidden meaning in Sartre’s words is that Faulkner’s world is a lived future. It is a world with a missing link since it looks absurd without a future. It is a world that should be transcended.



















Works Cited

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury: A Norton Critical Edition. Second Edition. Ed.by

David Minter. WW Norton & Company: New York, 1994. Print, pp. 3-199.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. “On The Sound and the Fury: Time in the Work of Faulkner.” The Sound and

the Fury: A Norton Critical Edition, Second Edition. Ed. By David Minter. WW Norton & Company: New York, 1994. Print, pp. 265-271.