Quote:
Originally Posted by agapeagape
Jcarson, would you mind giving a brief reason to give The Sound and the Fury another shot, I read the first section completely and about 20 pages of Quentin and then quit it because aside from one phenomenal representation of time I completely did not get it.
I'm sorry I missed this at first. I'll make an attempt, though I must warn that while the faculties governing my discriminating literary tastes are pristine, I am pretty inadaquate when it comes to actually
writing about great writing (see, for instance, the purple prose I've speckled throughout this thread--or, if you prefer, this herniated sentence).
For starters, the book found me at an extremely chaotic time in my life, and the Compson family felt almost exactly as if it was my own. Also, I don't think I'd ever read something so "experimental" (to use the hideous word of the LitCrit), and when I finished I remember thinking "i didn't know a book could do...
that." Neither of these facts will be of any help to you, but I think we can all recall a certain book that had a unique appeal for us as young readers.
More helpfully, I think Faulkner created a book that used a medium of high poetry to convey the fragmentary and fundamentally tragic condition of mankind. We are born into a world that is not our own, inherit a system of values that are not our own, and then promptly find ourselves tossed into a chaos without ever being able to truly communicate the source of this confusion. Three brothers are obsessed with their sister's early pregnancy, each experiences their grief in a profoundly different way; yet somehow Faulkner is able to sublimate their subjective griefs into a far grander agony over the march of time itself. As such, the disparate chapters have a connecting unity.
This unity is why you should read the book. It is not possible to expect to understand the timeline of events without finishing the book as a whole. In every part there are multiform connections to the other parts. Thus in addition to understanding the plot, reading the whole book allows you to appreciate its greater resonances which only exist when taken as a complete unit.
Also, don't be embarrassed to turn supplementary material. Something that really helped me understand the Benjy chapter was when I read how each servant (Dilsey, Luster, TP, etc) serves as a chronological post in the narrator's conciousness. Then, sadly, like many great books, I think it is one whose greatness can truly be apprehended with rereading.
Damn I should reread it.