Todo Tiene Su Como-Se-Llama

The Sound of Fury

So I'm reading The Sound and the Fury, right? And the first 58 pages are absolute murder. But I was expecting that. They're done in "stream of consciousness" and the perspective is that of Benjy, a retarded boy. It's very difficult to tell what is going on. There are something like fifteen very distinct and randomly ordered time periods in this portion (each one years apart from the others, with no indication of what has passed in-between), and you have to figure out for yourself when you've moved from one to the other and back again. At no point are you ever told anything about who the characters are that you are meeting, where they are, when they are, or what relationship they have with each other. You have to figure it out for yourself. To make matters worse, there are characters who have multiple names and characters who share the same name.

It's all very confusing, but I was making a bit of sense out of it, and it was, as I said, only the first 58 pages. Tonight, I picked the book up again to continue. The next perspective is 80 pages of the book, told from the point of view of Quentin, Benjy's older brother. After over 20 pages of Quentin, I reached the following paragraphs (and yes, they're representative of everything so far):

"I asked, but he didn't know whether another one would leave before noon or not because you'd think that interurbans. So the first one was another trolley. I got on. You can feel noon. I wonder if even miners in the bowels of the earth. That's why whistles: because people that sweat, and if just far enough from sweat you wont hear whistles and in eight minutes you should be that far from sweat in Boston. Father said a man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune Father said. A gull on an invisible wire attached through space dragged. You carry the symbol of your frustration through eternity. Then the wings are bigger Father said only who can play a harp.

"I could hear my watch whenever the car stopped, but not often they were already eating Who would play a Eating the business of eating inside of you space too space and time confused Stomach saying noon brain saying eat oclock All right I wonder what time it is what of it. People were getting out. The trolley didn't stop so often now, emptied by eating."

This is immediately after an entire two pages of completely random dialogue with no punctuation, line breaks, or capitalization . . . Not to mention the complete lack of an indication of who is talking, when, where, why, or about what.

What it mean. Faulkner's habit of not. Stars are pretty. Bed is cool until suspense. Crap the what the Pulitzer surprise glory flees.

*nods to Wilson for his contribution to the above paragraph*

So, Faulkner wins a Pulitzer for writing something that would get me an F from any English teacher in the country? What is that?! I don't get it. How is this any good at all? I'm open for suggestions here . . . explain.

Posted by Jared at February 4, 2004 11:54 PM | TrackBack