The Sound And The Fury

            Many novels have been written using flashback. Their content can be described as informative and filling. However, some authors, who use flashback in their writings, confuse the reader by writing out of sequence. Equipped with suspense, frustration, and even pity, William Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury is a novel one needs to have patience and concentration to comprehend.
             The characters in this novel are all very opposite and separately unique. There are four chapters in the novel that are narrated by four different people. The first three chapters consist of the combined memories, inner monologues, and voices of the three Compson brothers. The author narrates the fourth chapter as an attached observer. Each of the Compson's accounts occurs on different days. The brothers are Benjy, a severely retarded thirty-three year old man, confessing in April of 1928; Quentin, an educated Harvard student, speaking in June of 1910; and Jason, a resentful farm-supply store worker, speaking also in April of 1928. Caddy doesn't have a monologue, but is the organized center of the novel. She is the only daughter and the second oldest of the Compson family. Caddy becomes defiant in her teens, growing up with an apathetic mother and a father who's an alcoholic. She becomes detached and gets pregnant by a careless man named Dalton Ames. When Dalton refuses to have anything to do with Caddy and the pregnancy, Caddy marries Herbert Head. Marrying Herbert, who works at a bank, is a mistake on Caddy's behalf because she never truly loved him. Once Herbert discovers Caddy is pregnant by another man he leaves her alone, and Caddy is then shunned from the entire Compson family. Caddy names her daughter Quentin (after her brother) and then leaves the burden of raising the baby to Mrs. Compson and the black nanny, Dilsey. Dilsey Gibson is one of the more likeable characters in the novel. A very religious woman, she and her son, Luster, are loyally devoted to the Compson family.