Structure of The Sound and the Fury

When The Sound and the Fury originally came out, the most common critique was that the four portions were randomly and capriciously twisted. The decision by Faulkner to open the work with the Benjy section perplexed many critics and readers. Many critics thought this section was told through the eyes of a 33-year-old man, offered an insurmountable challenge to the reader. Some critics believed the novel should start with the final portion, while others believed Jason's piece should come first. Getting through the Benjy part without throwing up one's hands in despair is a difficult task. The novel's initial portion is unlike anything else that has been written before, and readers will be surprised by the hardship they will face.

Faulkner intensifies to the extreme the "loneliness" of the novel as a genre, noted by Benjamin. Still, at the same time, he paradoxically brings into existence a community of readers that any new, solitary reader may join or turn to for assistance to become a "good-enough" (if not ideal) reader of this novel. William Faulkner's vision through Sound and the Fury may illustrate the written text's Platonic powerlessness and orphanhood. 

The academic community recognized The Sound and the Fury as a modern classic and created an unprecedented body of severe criticism and scholarship around the novel. Faulkner was the most discussed author in critical academic publications in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Thus, it is possible to say that Faulkner's work became one of the centers around which the American literary studies community crystallized during its dramatic expansion following World War II. Subsequently, first-time readers of The Sound and the Fury, especially students or teachers, could turn to this community for support to become adequate, good-enough readers.

This novel is a microcosm of late-twentieth-century society and its attitude toward anything that deviates from the norm. Unfortunately, by seeking to exclude anything that did not involve social constructs, society was also robbing itself of possible benefits and knowledge sources that are out of reach for most people. As a result, no matter what decade they are reading the novel in, the reader is forced to re-examine the lens of that period and re-examine their lens.

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