Control: The Sound and the Fury (Review)

I, Dalton Lewis, understood virtually nothing about William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury but loved it. The first section is about Benjy, a mentally ill person who is slow and whimpers and cries when things don’t go according to tradition. He tries to handle a normal life and has help from African-American servants — who even take him to church to try to save him. The novel uses stream of consciousness to describe the downfall of the Compson family in the south from 1910 to 1928.

Stream of consciousness is a narrative technique in which the author shows the inner workings of a person’s mind. An unconventional novel can show more than a story with a basic narrator plainly telling what is happening in the story. The various perspectives of the story can involve unreliable narrators or people claiming things that are not true. It also can elevate the story by saying one thing that represents another — going to church is a metaphor for saving the souls of the weak and helpless, or investing poorly in cotton is a symbol of the financial decline of the South.

Faulkner built his own artistic universe with a fictional county in the deep south and crafted characters who lived, loved, hated, and framed each other. The men of the story feel deep jealousy of Caddy’s male lovers, hating that their family member sleeps with a number of men and has a daughter. That daughter is the cause of much chagrin in the family as they argue how to care for her. She, like her mother, sleeps around. The men hate her for it and want to save her from these men.

Quentin, one of the other siblings, goes to Harvard and has bizarre adventures there relating to a girl who is lost. Quentin shouldn’t be confused with Quentin, Caddy’s daughter, who is a completely different person in the same novel with the same name. I’m pretty sure Faulkner shows how a guy and a girl can have the same problems in different generations and with different genders. Older Quentin has legal troubles and is confused and scared and hates himself and hates young girls. Younger Quentin is a flighty girl who wants to run away. This is extremely effective — talking about hatred of girls and self is relevant now, with the plethora of killers and suicides who hate women and hate themselves. Older Quentin is an intelligent precursor to that.

African-Americans are also prevalent in the novel and other novels of Faulkner. He presents people as not always getting along or treating each other properly and also notes that some African-Americans struggle with being the help and needing to rise up out of that station. Jason, one of the Compson siblings, is always upset with the poor and African-Americans and anyone who doesn’t work and act responsibly like him.

Faulkner’s novels are so brilliant and different that I feel ashamed of my own novels in comparison. I write conventional stories with good guys and bad guys, and that’s not enough. I need to write some unconventional stories with narrators that are broken and deeply, overwhelmingly flawed. Faulkner’s characters are angry, broken people who hate themselves and everyone around them. There are racist characters that are taken seriously instead of being bland cardboard characters who frame and murder everyone.

I also want to point out that there are large sections of this — and many other — novels that I don’t fully understand. I can read just fine, but as I get to be an older mentally ill man I don’t always follow every single sentence in every single book that I read. I skim. I read a lot of the book but don’t get all of it spoon-fed to me correctly.

Men have worried about the purity of the women in their families for a very long time, and it isn’t getting better. Two generations of Compson women offend the men with their choices of lover. I think this reverberates strongly with a contemporary audience because it’s real and raw and reflects any people, anywhere.

Thanks, and take care, friends.