It is nearly unanimously considered a masterpiece by literary critics and scholars, but its unconventional narrative style frequently alienates new readers. Although the vocabulary is generally basic, the stream-of-consciousness technique, which attempts to transcribe the thoughts of the narrators directly, with frequent switches in time and setting and with loose sentence structure and grammar, has made it a quintessentially difficult modernist work.
Literary significance
The Sound and the Fury is a widely influential work of literature. Faulkner has been praised for his ability to recreate the thought process of the human mind. In addition, it is viewed as an essential development in the stream-of-consciousness literary technique.
Adaptations
A film adaptation was released in 1959 directed by Martin Ritt and starring Yul Brynner, Joanne Woodward, Margaret Leighton, Stuart Whitman, Ethel Waters, Jack Warden, and Albert Dekker. The movie bears little resemblance to the novel.
Another adaptation, The Sound and the Fury (2014), was directed by James Franco and starred Franco as Benjy Compson, Jacob Loeb as Quentin Compson, Joey King as Miss Quentin, Tim Blake Nelson as Mr. Compson, Loretta Devine as Dilsey, Ahna O’Reilly as Caddy Compson, Scott Haze as Jason Compson, Kylen Davis as Luster, Seth Rogen as a Telegraph Operator, Danny McBride as a Sheriff, and Logan Marshall-Green as Dalton Ames. It made its premiere at the 71st Venice International Film Festival, where it screened out-of-competition.
Limited edition
In 2012, The Folio Society released an edition, limited to 1480 copies, of The Sound and the Fury. This edition is the first to use colored ink to represent different time sequences for the first section of the novel. This limited edition is also sold with a special commentary volume edited by Faulkner scholars Stephen Ross and Noel Polk. According to The Folio Society, «We can never know if this edition is exactly what Faulkner would have envisaged, but the result justifies his belief that coloured inks would allow readers to follow the strands of the novel more easily, without compromising the ‘thought-transference’ for which he argued so passionately.»
