On Teaching The Sound and the Fury

ON TEACHING

THE SOUND AND THE FURY

By Christine Ann Evans

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The Montréal Review, July 2025

Twenty-five years ago, I had the chance to teach an interdisciplinary junior seminar for History and Literature majors on the Civil War and its aftermath. Lesley College (now University) was then a women’s college, preparing students to work in the fields of Education, Human Services, and Management. My students were for the most part Education majors who had selected History and Literature as their second major, since all Education students in Massachusetts were required to also complete a liberal arts major. I knew they were more fully invested in their professional majors, but hoped the focus of the class, the works I had chosen and my approach would engage them richly in the liberal arts.

The Sound and the Fury is to my mind (and not just mine) Faulkner’s masterwork. Set in the imagined county of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, the location of most of Faulkner’s other major novels, The Sound and the Fury is populated by a group of characters who reappear in his oeuvre. It chronicles the last generation of the Compson family, once southern landed gentry and, in the present of the novel, a mere step away from penury and shiftlessness. The last parcel of what had once been a considerable plantation had been sold off to pay a year of Harvard tuition for the most promising male of the family, Quentin, and to arrange the wedding of the daughter, Caddy, to a wealthy banker, in hopes these children would recoup the family’s lost fortunes. Quentin’s suicide and Caddy’s pre-marital affair, resultant pregnancy and decampment take those possibilities off the table.

The novel was a logical and promising choice when I was drawing up my syllabus for the class. Holding iconic status as an example of 20th-century modernist and southern fiction, it depicts a South in post-Civil War decline and a family seemingly incapable of making their way in a newly-configured world. Recounted largely from the point of view of that family’s three sons, each chapter reflects the mind of that character and asks that the reader adjust to widely varying narrative styles and mind sets.

In previous weeks students had read the iconic historical studies of the Civil War as well as Frederick Douglas’s and Harriet Jacob’s autobiographies and Mary Chestnut’s diaries. They had engaged with these texts, rich but accessible first-hand accounts of individual experience. As I started rereading The Sound and the Fury in preparation for my class, doubts grew about the wisdom of my choice of that particular novel.

The very first page plunges the reader into perhaps the most challenging part of the work, the world as refracted through the mind of Benjy, “the idiot” sibling, who lives in an eternal present of sensation and loss of a sister whose image he can’t fully conjure. The following chapter focuses on Quentin, the bright hope of the family, and his equally solipsistic world in the hours before he commits suicide in Cambridge, MA. The account of the youngest son, Jason, is perhaps the most linear and accessible, but also the most limited given the narrator’s self-interest and lack of insight into others.

To my surprise, rather than throwing up their hands at the Benjy chapter, my students plunged in, and it struck me: most had chosen the fields of Education and Human Services and had already completed internships that allowed them to work with a variety of students and clients. They used their experiences to assess how well Faulkner had been able to recreate the sensations and emotional attachments of an intellectually disabled character.

The older brother Quentin is, in contrast to Benjy, a highly educated and refined intelligence, but although his narrative is more linear than his brother’s, it is no less solipsistic. Like the other chapters of the novel, the events if this chapter occur in one single day, at the end of which a despairing Quentin will take his own life. Quentin spends the day wandering through the city of Cambridge, where Lesley is located. He goes from Harvard Square to Inman Square and then back to the Charles River, where he jumps from one of its bridges and drowns.

Here again, to my surprise, my students engaged willingly with Quentin’s physical and mental peregrinations. All had taken psychology courses as part of their professional majors, and some planned to go into the Human Services field, which would prepare them for a career in social work or counseling psychology. Quentin’s behavior, his thought processes, the obsessive preparation for his own death drew them into an analysis of this blighted young man and the motivation behind his suicide.

In rereading the novel in preparation for writing this article, I wondered: did I do justice to that work 25 years ago? In letting my students’ interests plot the direction of some of our discussions, definitely yes. But I would today put more emphasize on elements I skimmed over before, my own understanding of the novel having been enriched and challenged by more recent developments in literary studies.

We discussed Caddy, pivotal but absent, viewed only through the shifting views of her three brothers, never allowed her own interiority. Now, though, I see her more clearly as a character reduced to her physical and material presence – her fresh smell and her embraces (Benjy), her sexual drives (Quentin), her virginity, “the minute fragile membrane of her maidenhead” (her father), her sexuality and resultant monetary worth (Jason). She is “carnally” present (important for her exchange value) and yet is the imaginative creation of the males in her family.1 I would bring that dynamic out more clearly today.

I would also focus more on the Black servant Dilsey and her family. Twenty-five years ago I allowed the last lines of Faulkner’s epilogue to do all the work for me: Dilsey and her family “endured.” This suggested, I told my students, their staying power and their ability to withstand difficulties, assured them an eternal dignity.

Dismissed by youngest son Jason as shiftless and useless mouths to feed, the work of Dilsey and her family in fact sustains and upholds the Compsons’ dilapidated home and disintegrating family. Their physical efforts are suggested through the damage done to their bodies, from the painful description of Dilsey’s husband’s rheumatism (“’Roskus cant life his arms today,’” “’I can’t use my right hand no more’”) to Dilsey’s joint-cracking service despite her advanced age and infirmities. Mrs. Compson calls her commands down to the kitchen from her bedroom, and it is Dilsey who groans and creaks her way up with food and hot water bottles. “Mrs. Compson stood watching her as she mounted, steadying herself against the wall with one hand, holding her skirts up with the other.”

As Dilsey repeats at the end, it was she who raised all the Compson children and saw the clan through to the end of the line. “’I’ve seed the first en de last’.” It was the work of Dilsey and her family that upheld the Compson family at the end, shoring it up against disintegration, and it was the work of her forebears that created the wealth of the family.2

I might now raise another issue with students. Even though in this novel Faulkner chose not to grant interiority to Caddy, a white woman, or Dilsey, an African American woman, elsewhere in his oeuvre he lent a voice to both female and African American characters by centering the narrative on their perspectives. He “inhabited” characters outside of his direct experience, that of an upper-middle-class white southern man. Such authorial crossing of gender and ethnic lines raises questions in the 2020s.

In As I Lay Dying Faulkner fully embodied the voice and first-person perspective of a female character. Indeed, three women join the symphony of voices heard: the already-dead matriarch Addie Bundren, as well as her daughter and a neighbor. Addie narrates -- post-mortem -- the whole of her affective life, from her relationship to her husband, to the lover who fathered one of her children, to her children, a life she was not reluctant to leave. The novel follows Addie’s coffin as her family hauls it across a treacherous flooded landscape to satisfy her last, punitive wish -- to be buried far from the family homestead.

And in Light in August Faulkner depicts a character who most probably is part Black, Joe Christmas, but whose race remains an open question since he was a foundling. In sections of the novel the third-person figural narration skirts as close as possible to the consciousness of Christmas without ever adopting the first person. “But then, when he first went to work, he would not need to think of her during the day; he hardly ever thought about her. Now he could not help himself. She was in his mind so constantly that it was almost as if he were looking at her, there in the house, patient, waiting, inescapable, crazy.”

So Faulkner clearly felt no compulsion to adhere to what the novelist Zadie Smith terms “The old – and never especially helpful – adage write what you know,” or, more starkly, “Stay in your lane.”3

The controversy surrounding the novel American Dirt serves as a test case for the possible pitfalls of ignoring this injunction. Written by an American with Puerto Rican roots about a Mexican woman who illegally crosses the border into the United States, the novel has attracted harsh criticism for its “inauthenticity.” Critic Esmeralda Bermudez calls out the author for her portrayal of Mexicans and Mexican culture, contends that the author’s distance from the culture and experience she is portraying led to gross misrepresentations, to distorting stereotypes: “It’s a book of villains and victims, the two most tired tropes about immigrants in the media.”4 Myriam Gurba in her turn accuses the author of having “stepped out in public wearing her ill-fitting Mexican costume,” of resembling less the John Steinbeck of Grapes of Wrath than “Vanilla Ice.”5

Beyond the harsh, at times ad hominem rhetoric of these two critics, their assessments both come down to the same issue: shot through as it is with inaccuracies and stereotypes, this is simply not a good novel. Perhaps we have to distinguish between “crossing lines” and “writing poorly,” as Leon Krauze does in “The Problem With American Dirt Is Not Its Author’s Background.”6 While conceding it is a “perfectly adequate and suspenseful romance thriller,” he concludes that the book comes nowhere near to being the “Great American novel” on “violence, loss and immigration.”

‘What insults my soul,” Zadie Smith write in the article cited above, “is the idea… that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally ‘like’ us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally.” In The Sound and the Fury and other works, Faulkner created a teaming, living Yoknapatawpha County, populated with a cast of characters ranging from white gentry fallen on hard times, to hardscrabble farmers scratching a living off the land, to Black characters and those of mixed race uncomfortably navigating treacherous racial lines.

And if both Caddy and Dilsey and her family are marginalized in the narrative structure of The Sound and the Fury, this is the result of a consummate writer’s decision to recapitulate and reenforce narratively their place within the Compson family dynamic and in the post-bellum Southern mind,7 a decision consonant with and in service to the complexities of the novel’s focus, not an effort to “stay in his lane.”

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Christine Ann Evans, Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at Lesley University, is the author of The French Historical Narrative and the Fall of France: Simone Weil and Her Contemporaries Face the Debacle, published by Lexington Books in 2022.

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This essay is part of the "Teaching..." series launched by The Montreal Review in 2024 and edited by Stephen Haven and Laura Ann Reed. The series publishes essays by scholars, writers, and artists on teaching and interpreting the work, ideas, and lives of prominent authors, philosophers, artists, and political figures.

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1 See Luce Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One, in particular the chapter “Women on the Market” (Cornell, 1985).

2 See DuBois’s Black Reconstruction in America (Harcourt Brace and Company, 1935), in particular the chapter “The Planter” and The 1619 Project, in particular the chapter “The Origins of American Capitalism” (One World, 2021).