The Sound and the Fury (1929), William Faulkner's modernist masterpiece, chronicles the decline of the Compsons, a once-prominent Southern aristocratic family in Mississippi. Told through four distinct perspectives, the novel opens with Benjy, a cognitively disabled man for whom past and present merge indistinguishably. His brother Quentin's section follows, consumed by obsessive guilt over his sister Caddy's sexual fall and the family's fading honor. Jason, the cynical third brother, narrates with bitter greed, while the final section centers on Dilsey, the enduring Black servant who witnesses the family's ruin. Through fragmented stream-of-consciousness, Faulkner explores time, memory, loss, and the collapsing Old South.
