The Sound and the Fury

Old and New South in The South and the Fury
William Faulkner’s tragic depiction of the corruption of the Old South aristocracy in the post-Civil War world is ranked a masterpiece for its style and themes. He was particulary interested in the decline /propast/ of the Deep South after the Civil War. Many of his novels explore the deterioration /određivanje/ of the Southern aristocracy after destruction of its wealth and way of life during Civil War and Reconstruction.
Stilistically, Faulkner used stream of consciousness, interior monologues, dicontinuous time, fragmented chronological order, multiple narrators, complex allusions, and allegory.
The novel set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, which is populated with the sceletons of old mansions and the ghosts of great men, partriarchs and generals from the past whose aristocrstic families fails to live up to their historical greatness. He explores Southern memory, reality, and myth, with the focus on honor and sin as seen through the tragic decline of the Compson family. Beneath the shadow of the past grandeur, these families attempt to accept old Southern values, codes, and myths that are corrupted and out of place in the reality of the modern world. The families in Faulkner’s novels are rife /mnogobrojne/ with failed sons, disgraced daughters, and smoldering /tinjajuća/ resentments /ri’zentment-ogorčenost/ between whites and blacks in the aftermath of African-American slavery.
The novel tells the story through four different viewpoints: the three Compson brothers –Benjy, Quentin, and Jason – and their black servant Dilsey.
The Civil War shattered /razbiti, slomiti/ the Southern genteel /đen’ti:l-otmen, uglađen/ tradition, with its emphasis on male responsibility to defend female honor, purity, and virginity – in short, the female reputation.
The whole book tells about downfall one rich and intellectual family. They are not noble at all. They are a poor family who came to the South and cheat Indians and took piece of land. The reason of downfall is multiplex. There is a strange economic position in South after war. But he wanted to describe the lost of love and that we can not live without it. Compsons are doomed to be destroyed because of lack of love. Father turned to alcoholism losing the social and the phisical position, and land. In book, it’s about lost of mother, she couldn’t love anybody, not even her husband and children.
Caroline Compson, the mother, changes her son’s name from Maury to Benjamin. She didn’t want for her idiotic son to have the name of her brother. She wants to be rich and noble so Compsons sold the Benjy’s pasture to sent her oldest son Quentin to Harvard University. Harvard University is nice sounded to her so she intends to gain better reputation for her family by it.
The novel is also celebrated for innovative use of time: time is variable rather than constant, personal rather than objective. They all brothers have problem with time unlike Dilsey who has no problem with it.
Benjy’s narration is like eye-camera. He cannot distinguish between the past and present and thus has no fixed idea of time because he is an idiot.
Quentin was very intellectual but he killed himself because „he can’t live in the world that he is now. You can’t kill time.“ He is afraid of his sexuality so he thinks of castriating. He attempts to escape time’s grasp by breaking his watch, but its ticking continues tu haunt him afterward. The watch is a gift from his father and it constantly reminds Quentin of the glorius heritage of his family. Watch’s ticking symbolizes constant passage of time. He is obsessed by time and thus imprisioned by his memories of the past, which drive him to suicide. For him, only past exist, so that could be one of the reason for his death.