Throughout his fiction, William Faulkner was concerned to record what he saw as the moral degeneracy of the American Deep South and the dying post-Civil War culture into which he had himself been born. Probably his greatest single achievement was The Sound and the Fury, a complex and ambitious novel which takes its title from Macbeth's description of life in the Shakespeare play ('a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury') and which has a first section that is indeed a tale told by an 'idiot', the severely retarded Benjy Compson. Set in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County, the book reveals the story of the Compson family in three further sections, two told by Benjy's brothers and a final one seen from the viewpoint of their negro servants. At the heart of the story is Caddy Compson. To Benjy, Caddy is his beloved sister whose name echoes forever in his limited mind. To Quentin, narrator of the second section (set eighteen years earlier than the others), she is the object of a guilty incestuous obsession which eventually drives him to take his own life. To Jason, the bitter and twisted narrator of the third section, she is the cause of all his troubles in life. As the interlocking narratives unfold, readers witness the disintegration of the Compson family in a welter of alcohol, mutual hatreds, greed and despair. Faulkner made much use in his fiction of modernist techniques (stream of consciousness, multiple and unreliable narrators) pioneered by European writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. However, he combined these with a particularly American tradition of writing about the Deep South to produce novels which chart moral decline with merciless precision. The Sound and the Fury, in many ways his finest work, has all the cruel inevitability and emotional power of a Greek tragedy.

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