Assignment On 'how Do You As A Person View The Novel 'sound & The Fury'

Assignment on;

"H o w d o y o u , a s a p e r s o n , v i e w the novel "The Sound and The Fury"?"

Submitted to:

Dr. Rafique Memon

Submitted by:

Al t a f A hme d She i kh M.A (Hons.) English Literature Roll No. ENG/2K6/10 Institute of English Language & Literature, University of Sindh, Jamshoro. Dated;

November 2nd; 2009

My perception of this novel is quite realistic. It can be called less of personal perception, rather more of objective or impersonal perception because it is next to impossible to fix a yardstick for measuring the quality & standard of any piece of literature. In literature, and in art too, everything piece carries its own significance which is unique. Let me begin by analyzing this novel with its very title. The title of the novel is taken from Macbeth's soliloquy in act 5, scene 5 of William Shakespeare's Macbeth: "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing." Immediately obvious is the notion of a "tale told by an idiot", in this case Benjy, whose view of the Compsons' story opens the novel. The idea can be extended also to Quentin and Jason, whose narratives display their own varieties of idiocy. More to the point, the novel recounts the decline and death of a traditional upper-class Southern family, "the way to dusty death". The last line is, perhaps, the most meaningful; Faulkner said in his speech upon being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature that people must write about things that come from the heart, "universal truths". Otherwise they signify nothing. The novel centers on the Compson family, former Southern aristocrats who are struggling to deal with the dissolution of their family and its reputation. The novel is separated into four distinct sections. The first, April 7, 1928, is written from the perspective of Benjamin "Benjy" Compson, a 33-year-old man with severe mental handicaps. Benjy's section is characterized by a highly disjointed narrative style with frequent chronological leaps. The second section, June 2, 1910, focuses on Quentin Compson, Benjy's younger brother, and the events leading up to his suicide. In the third section, April 6, 1928, Faulkner writes from the point of view of Jason, Quentin and Benjy's cynical younger brother. In the fourth and final section, set a day after the third, on April 8, 1928, Faulkner introduces a third person limited omniscient point of view. The last section primarily focuses on Dilsey, one of the Compson's black servants. Jason is also a focus in the section, but Faulkner presents glimpses of the thoughts and deeds of everyone in the family. A simple plot summary cannot adequately describe this novel, as much of the novel's strength lies in its technical achievements and lyrical prose. The Sound and the Fury has been read as typifying the South as a whole. Faulkner was very much preoccupied with the question of how the ideals of the old South could be maintained or preserved in the post-Civil War era. Seen in this light, the decline of the Compson family might be interpreted as an examination of the corrosion of traditional

morality, only to be replaced by a modern helplessness. The most compelling characters are also the most tragic, as Caddy and Quentin cannot survive within the context of the society whose values they reject as best they can, and it is left to Jason, unappealing but competently pragmatic, to maintain the status quo, as illustrated by the novel's ending. The novel's appreciation has in large part been due to the technique of its construction, Faulkner's ability to recreate the thought patterns of the human mind. It was an essential development in the stream-of-consciousness narrative technique. This novel was Faulkner's personal favorite. It is often regarded as the best in Faulkner's works. Not surprisingly, the novel has received an extraordinary amount of critical analysis, much of which has been devoted to explaining Faulkner's technical experimentations. Critics have also widely discussed Faulkner's treatment of issues such as race, suicide, incest, time, history, and religion. Central to any reading of the novel, however, is the character that Faulkner claimed was his source for the novel — Caddy. One critic has claimed that the tragedy of the Compsons is that they are slaves to themselves and to the past. This argument is particularly relevant to the novel's first two sections. Benjy's monologue, for example, is uttered in the present, but is mainly comprised of memories from his childhood and youth. Most of these memories are connected to his sister whose departure following her marriage to Herbert Head leaves a void in Benjy's life. Because Caddy was the one family member to provide Benjy with the nurturing love that he needed, and because Mrs. Compson does little else but whine about being punished by God for her family's transgressions, Caddy was more of a mother figure to Benjy than Mrs. Compson was. Through his monologue, which often obscures the boundaries between present and past, Benjy reveals both a deep-seated attachment to a past inhabited by Caddy and a desperate desire for her return. Like his companion, Luster, who is busy searching for a lost quarter, Benjy, too, hopes to find that which he has lost. There are also echoes of existential themes in the novel, as Sartre argued in his famous essay on Faulkner. Many of the characters also draw upon classical, Biblical and literary sources: Some believe Quentin to have been inspired by Hamlet and Caddy by Ophelia. The novel achieved great critical success and a prominent place among the greatest of American novels, and is counted in one of the hundred greatest books. Recently, it was selected by the Modern Library as the sixth greatest English-language novel of the twentieth century. Not to forget it earned William Faulkner Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 which is perhaps the highest worldly justification to declare this novel as one of the masterpiece of all time.