50 Fun Facts About The Sound and the Fury

The title of The Sound and the Fury comes from a bleak speech about life in which Shakespeare tragedy?

Macbeth supplies the title: told that his wife is dead, the king compares life to a fool's noisy story that means nothing. Faulkner then opens the novel inside the mind of Benjy, who cannot make sense of events.

Benjy Compson narrates the opening section of The Sound and the Fury although he is unable to do what?

Speak is the one thing he cannot do, yet his section relays other people's talk in full, even when he does not understand it. He bellows or moans, and those around him must guess why.

The pasture sold to pay for Quentin Compson's schooling in The Sound and the Fury becomes what?

A golf course replaces the pasture that had been Benjy's share of the family land. The players' shouts for a caddie remind him of his absent sister, and he moans at the fence.

William Faulkner said The Sound and the Fury grew from the image of a little girl doing what?

Climbing a tree to peek at a funeral, the girl shows her muddy underwear to the brothers looking up from below. Faulkner built Caddy Compson, and then the whole novel, around that picture.

On the last day of his life in The Sound and the Fury, what does Quentin Compson deliberately break?

His watch is one way Quentin tries to stop knowing the time, along with keeping away from his own shadow. Clock bells go on reminding him of the hour anyway.

Most of The Sound and the Fury unfolds over a single weekend in 1928 that marks which holiday?

Easter weekend frames three of the four sections, one each on Good Friday, Holy Saturday and the Sunday. Benjy turns 33 on the Saturday.

Caddy Compson is at the heart of The Sound and the Fury, yet what is unusual about her role?

She never narrates, so readers see Caddy only through other people's eyes. The four sections follow her childhood, her adolescence, her adulthood and finally her absence from the family.

Which fictional Mississippi county, the setting of most Faulkner novels, is home to The Sound and the Fury?

Yoknapatawpha is the county Faulkner called his own apocryphal one, and he drew a map of it for a later novel. It stands in for Lafayette County, where he spent most of his life.

Which actor directed the 2014 film of The Sound and the Fury and cast himself as Benjy Compson?

James Franco directed and played Benjy, and gave cameos to Seth Rogen and Danny McBride. The film had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.

The Sound and the Fury helped William Faulkner win which honor for 1949, awarded for his novels?

The Nobel Prize for 1949 was held over for a year, so Faulkner collected it in Stockholm in December 1950, at the same banquet as the 1950 winner Bertrand Russell.

The Compsons' hometown in The Sound and the Fury is modeled on which real Mississippi town where Faulkner lived?

Oxford, the seat of Lafayette County, is the model for the Compsons' town. Faulkner's family moved there when he was a small boy, and it stayed his home for most of his life.

The Compsons sell family land in The Sound and the Fury to send Quentin to which university?

Harvard is where Quentin spends his final day, weighed down by guilt over the land that paid for it. Faulkner drew those Northern scenes from a visit to a friend in New Haven, Connecticut.

In The Sound and the Fury, Caddy Compson names her daughter Quentin in memory of whom?

Her dead brother had drowned himself, and the girl, known as Miss Quentin, carries his name. She grows up in the Compson house under the thumb of her uncle Jason.

How is the final section of The Sound and the Fury told, unlike the three sections before it?

In the third person, an outside narrator follows Dilsey, Jason and Benjy through the Sunday. Only here does the novel describe what its characters look like.

The Sound and the Fury is a landmark of which modernist technique, also used by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf?

Stream of consciousness shapes the first three sections, each an inner monologue that covers a single day. The plot arrives out of order, but within each day events run in sequence.

Which actor played Jason Compson in the 1959 film of The Sound and the Fury?

Yul Brynner played a Jason rewritten as a step-uncle, in a film built around his clashes with Miss Quentin. Gregory Peck had earlier signed to star.

Jason Compson loses heavily in The Sound and the Fury by speculating on the price of which crop?

Cotton futures are Jason's gamble, and he funds it with what his sister sends for her daughter. He neglects both his job and those investments to chase his niece around town.

What does each of the four sections of The Sound and the Fury carry as its only heading?

A date heads each section, and they run out of order: the second jumps back eighteen years to 1910. A stage version of a single section even took its day as a subtitle.

In Benjy's section of The Sound and the Fury, what does the text usually switch into when time shifts?

Italics usually signal that Benjy's mind has slipped to another time, though not always. An editor once stripped them out, and Faulkner wrote to demand that they be restored.

Quentin Compson of The Sound and the Fury returns to tell which 1936 Faulkner novel about planter Thomas Sutpen?

Absalom, Absalom! has Quentin piece together the Sutpen story with his college roommate. Guinness once listed a 1,288-word sentence from it as the longest in literature.

Which novel about the Bundren family's burial journey did Faulkner publish the year after The Sound and the Fury?

As I Lay Dying appeared in 1930, told by fifteen narrators across 59 chapters. It goes back to the same invented county, this time among poor farmers rather than a fallen old family.

What does Miss Quentin steal from her uncle Jason on the night she flees in The Sound and the Fury?

His hidden money is gone from its box by morning, and much of it was hers by right: her mother had been sending it for years. Jason gives chase but never catches her.

Which fictional town, the seat of Faulkner's invented county, is home to the Compsons in The Sound and the Fury?

Jefferson is the county seat in most of Faulkner's fiction, and the old Compson and Sartoris plantations lay close beside it. The town turns up in story after story.

Quentin Compson of The Sound and the Fury drowns himself in which river, where a bridge plaque now remembers him?

The Charles is where Quentin ends his life in June 1910. A brass plaque the size of a single brick, set low on the Anderson Memorial Bridge, honors the fictional student.

What was Benjy Compson's name in The Sound and the Fury before his mother changed it when he was five?

Maury was the name of his mother's brother, and she took it back once the boy's disability was plain. From then on he was Benjamin.

With whom does Miss Quentin run away from the Compson house at the end of The Sound and the Fury?

A carnival worker from the show visiting town is her way out. Jason trails the troupe to the next town, picks a fight with one of the hands and gets hurt without ever finding her.

What is Luster hunting for through much of Benjy's section of The Sound and the Fury?

A quarter is the price of that night's show, and Luster has lost his. In the end it is Miss Quentin who gives him one.

Before borrowing from Shakespeare, William Faulkner gave The Sound and the Fury which one-word working title?

Twilight was the working title of a story Faulkner first planned as a short piece about children sent away from a funeral. He wrote it without expecting it to sell.

In The Sound and the Fury, what does Caddy's husband Herbert Head promise her brother Jason, who never gets it?

A job in a bank vanishes when Head learns his bride was pregnant before they met and divorces her. Eighteen years on, Jason is still bitter and takes it out on her daughter.

What is done to Benjy Compson in The Sound and the Fury after he chases a schoolgirl he takes for Caddy?

He is castrated after running at the girl, whom he believes to be his long-gone sister. Faulkner borrowed wording from Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises to describe the operation.

In Benjy's memories in The Sound and the Fury, what does Caddy wear for the first time at fourteen?

Perfume is a memory Benjy weaves into the day of Caddy's wedding, two moments when his sister seemed to be leaving him. He senses changes in her that the others miss.

At Caddy's wedding in The Sound and the Fury, Benjy gets drunk on what, believing it is sarsaparilla?

Champagne is the drink, in a scene that turns the water-into-wine miracle of the wedding at Cana upside down. Too dizzy to know why, Benjy thinks the family's cows are jumping about.

In the final scene of The Sound and the Fury, Benjy howls when Luster drives the wrong way around what?

A Confederate monument stands in the town square, and Benjy is used to passing it on one side only. Jason comes back, steps in and takes him round the usual way.

On his last day in The Sound and the Fury, Quentin Compson is accused of what after helping a lost Italian girl?

Kidnapping is what the girl's brother takes it for when he finds Quentin trying to see her home from a bakery. She knows no English, and Quentin ends up paying a fine.

In The Sound and the Fury, what does Quentin Compson falsely claim to his father that he has committed?

Incest, on one reading, strikes Quentin as less shameful than his sister's affair with an outsider. Faulkner later said Quentin only imagined making the confession.

Which lover of Caddy Compson does her brother Quentin try, and fail, to fight in The Sound and the Fury?

Dalton Ames is the man whose name Quentin keeps repeating on his last day. He later attacks a classmate who reminds him of Ames, and is knocked out cold.

Which college roommate of Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury also appears in a later Faulkner novel?

Shreve was based on a friend of a friend, Stephen Benet, and took his name from Benet's Yale roommate. He returns to help Quentin puzzle out an old Mississippi mystery.

Which Faulkner short story about a frightened washerwoman features the Compson children of The Sound and the Fury?

That Evening Sun is narrated by Quentin, looking back on a night when the children could not grasp the washerwoman Nancy's terror. Its title is thought to come from the song Saint Louis Blues.

The Sound and the Fury found little commercial success until which sensational 1931 Faulkner novel made his name?

Sanctuary was Faulkner's commercial breakthrough, a crime story he is said to have called a potboiler written for profit. After it, the Compson novel grew in popularity and critics began to pay attention.

In The Sound and the Fury, which smell makes Jason Compson ill?

Gasoline nauseates Jason, yet he buys the car anyway, one of many spiteful choices that hurt mostly himself. He also needles his boss and his niece for no gain at all.

What does Jason Compson do in The Sound and the Fury with the show tickets that Luster begs him for?

Burns them rather than give them away, and the reader gets no warning. Jason's section keeps his plans hidden, so each small cruelty lands as a surprise.

What kills Jason Compson III, the father of the four Compson children, in The Sound and the Fury?

Alcoholism kills the children's father in the years after Quentin's death, leaving Jason and his mother to run the house. Jason hates him, yet lives by the same bleak view of the world.

What do the Compson children in The Sound and the Fury call the grandmother whose funeral they are kept from?

Damuddy was Faulkner's own name for his maternal grandmother, and he gave it to the Compson children's grandmother too. The day she dies is the earliest one Benjy remembers, and his section keeps returning to it.

Which preacher gives the Sunday sermon that moves Dilsey so deeply near the end of The Sound and the Fury?

Shegog slides from formal English into Black vernacular as the sermon builds. A near-namesake, Robert Sheegog, built the Mississippi house that Faulkner bought the year after the novel came out.

Which critic edited the 1946 anthology for which Faulkner wrote his appendix to The Sound and the Fury?

Malcolm Cowley put together The Portable Faulkner, and the appendix follows the Compsons from 1699 to 1945. Faulkner wrote it without rereading the novel, so the two disagree in places.

Faulkner's appendix to The Sound and the Fury traces the Compsons to a Scottish ancestor who fled which battle?

Culloden drove Quentin MacLachan to America, where the family built a plantation that decayed after the Civil War. The appendix opens and closes with a Quentin leaving home.

Jason Compson chases his runaway niece to which neighboring town in The Sound and the Fury, only to get hurt?

Mottson is as far as Jason gets: he provokes a fight with one of the show's hands and injures himself. He has to hire a man to drive him home.

Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury was modeled on which longtime servant of William Faulkner's own family?

Caroline Barr worked for the Faulkners, and the character she inspired is the novel's moral center. Dilsey is the one steady figure in the collapsing Compson household.

The Sound and the Fury ranks sixth on which publisher's 1998 list of the century's best English-language novels?

Modern Library placed it sixth, one spot above Catch-22 and the highest of three Faulkner novels on the list. The board that voted included the writers William Styron, Gore Vidal and Shelby Foote.

Which actress played Miss Quentin in the 1959 film of The Sound and the Fury?

Joanne Woodward was almost 30 when she played the 17-year-old Miss Quentin. It was her second Faulkner adaptation in two years for the director Martin Ritt, after The Long, Hot Summer.