The past takes on a sort of super-reality its contours are hard and clear, unchangeable. In a very famous essay on Faulkner called " On The Sound and the Fury: Time in the Work of Faulkner," Jean-Paul Sartre argued that this negotiation of the past makes Faulkner’s novel a brilliant example of modern technique and existential philosophy. Instead, Faulkner allows the center of the novel to exist as a gaping hole, one which various narrators attempt to fill with their own memories of the past. Ironically, Caddy is the one Compson who’s not given a section of the novel in which to explore her own story. Caddy’s sexuality, her early pregnancy, and her quick and unhappy marriage are the obscured heart of this novel: everything else happens after (and as a response to) the actions of Caddy. The novel traces the decaying values of the Southern society in which it’s based, while also tracking the desperation and hopelessness of individuals (the three brothers of the Compson family) as they each try, in their own way, to mourn the loss of their sister, Caddy. Seventy years later, it's being read and taught on a regular basis. The Sound and the Fury wasn’t a flash in the pan, either. His work was so brilliant, in fact, that the good folks at the Nobel Foundation awarded him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949. Once Sanctuary made it big, folks started realizing that Faulkner’s other work was actually technically (and emotionally) brilliant. It’s a potboiler of a novel, one with lots of alcohol and sex and violence. Of course, the funny part of this story is that Faulkner didn’t gain a wide readership until 1931, when he published Sanctuary.
That’s a fancy way of saying that The Sound and the Fury made Faulkner famous – fast. It was Faulkner’s first critically-acclaimed novel, and it immediately launched the young author from Mississippi into the literary limelight. We don’t mean to toot Faulkner’s horn here, but lots of folks have been saying things a lot like these ever since The Sound and the Fury burst onto the scene in 1929. Heck, it may just be the Great American Novel. It may also be the greatest family drama ever composed. It may also be the most searing discussion of race in a modernist novel. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner may just be the greatest Southern novel ever written.
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