The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner.mobi [139]
And that was all. These others were not Compsons. They were black:
TP. Who wore on Memphis’s Beale Street the fine bright cheap intransigent clothes manufactured specifically for him by the Jew owners of Chicago and New York Sweatshops.
FRONY. Who married a pullman porter and went to St Louis to live and later moved back to Memphis to make a home for her mother since Dilsey refused to go further than that.
LUSTER. A man, aged 14. Who was not only capable of the complete care and security of an idiot twice his age and three times his size, but could keep him entertained.
DILSEY.
They endured.
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are designed to enhance your group’s reading of three of William Faulkner’s greatest novels: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom! We hope that they will provide you with new ways of thinking and talking about three works that stand as major landmarks in the history of modern American literature, works that exemplify Faulkner’s bold stylistic and formal innovations, his creation of unforgettably powerful voices and characters, and his brilliant insight into the psychological, economic, and social realities of life in the South in the transition from the Civil War to the modern era. In their intellectual and aesthetic richness, these novels raise nearly endless possibilities for discussion. The questions below will necessarily be limited and are meant to open several, but certainly not all, areas of inquiry for your reading group.
READER’S GUIDE
1. The novel’s title is taken from a monologue spoken by Shakespeare’s Macbeth, who has attained the throne of Scotland through murder and has held it through the most brutal violence and tyranny; at this point in the play he has just heard that his wife has killed herself. Sated with his own corruption and looking forward to his imminent defeat and death, he says: “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.” Why do you think Faulkner chose a phrase from this passage for his title? How is this passage applicable to the novel? Do you find the novel as pessimistic and despairing as Macbeth’s speech?
2. In The Sound and the Fury Faulkner makes use of the stream of consciousness technique, which was also used earlier in the 1920s in such experimental works as James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. He further complicates matters for the reader by scrambling, as it were, the time frames referred to by the narrating consciousness of the opening section of the novel. How do you learn to find your way in Benjy’s chapter? How many time periods are interspersed? What are some of the events Benjy is remembering? If Benjy is the “idiot” of Macbeth’s speech, in what ways can he be seen, nonetheless, as both a sensitive and sentient observer of his family?
3. All of the novel’s crucial events are registered in Benjy’s section and are later recapitulated or expanded upon by other narrators, for Benjy is in many ways the central and most important narrating