37. The Sound and the Fury

37. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (12/7/2011 - 12/15/2011)

This was also one of the strangest books I've ever read, mainly due to the narration styles of the text.  Faulkner split this book into four sections, each told from the perspective of a different member of the Compson family.  The problem is that Benjy, the youngest son, is intellectually disabled/mentally retarded (depending on how politically correct you want to be), Quentin, the eldest son, is gradually descending into insanity, Jason, the middle son, is a heartless, mean person who is obsessed with blaming his sister for his misfortune, and the final section is told from no real perspective at all.

Each of the first three sections are written from a first person point of view, which creates even more problems.  For example, Benjy has no concept of the passage of time; his narration skips from his present (wherein he is 33) to his childhood (around age 5) to his adolescence (around age 15) without warning or explanation, sometimes right in the middle of a sentence.  It was nearly impossible to decipher on my own, so I used a variety of guides (including, to my shame, SparkNotes) to help me understand what the heck was going on. Quentin is gradually going insane -- he kills himself, which I know seems like a spoiler, but it definitely isn't in the context of this novel -- and so his section gradually loses punctuation, grammar, and total comprehensibility by the end of his section.  This is also really hard to understand, almost harder than Benjy's section, so this gave me a lot of trouble as well.  In general, the book prompts the necessity for multiple readings.

All three brothers are obsessed with their sister, Caddie.  Caddie is between Jason and Benjy in age, and her actions have repercussions on all members of the family.  She loses her virginity to a man she doesn't want to marry, gets married very soon after, and then is kicked out of her family when her new husband realizes her child is not his.  This baby is dumped onto the Compson family, who raise her as Caddie leaves for a life in Paris.  Benjy recognizes that Caddie is the only member of the family that really loves and cares about him, and since he cannot understand the passage of time, he does not know how to deal with Caddie's growing up.  Quentin sees Caddie's pregnancy as shameful for the family and so offers to help take the fall by claiming that they had sex and the baby is his (somehow, to Quentin, incest is a better choice than wedlock, which I don't understand).  Jason blames Caddie for losing him an opportunity for a life and a job with her ex-husband, so he steals from the money she sends her daughter for her expenses.  The family is so absorbed with Caddie that the rest of their lives don't really function outside her context.

I don't know if I liked this book.  I probably won't read it again, if only because the time requirement of  it is immense and I know I won't have the time to devote to it again for a long time.  Plus I'm not sure I could handle the craziness of the book again, which probably means I didn't really like it.  If you greatly enjoy stream of consciousness writing, then this is probably a good book to read -- I've read James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which is highly stream of consciousness, and this seems like a strong American equivalent.