Over the course of the 30 years or so relayed in the novel, the family falls into financial ruin, loses its religious faith and the respect of the town of Jefferson, and many of them die tragically.

The first, reflecting events occurring and consequent thoughts and memories on April 7, 1928, is written in the voice and from the perspective of Benjamin "Benjy" Compson, an intellectually disabled 33-year-old man.

In the third section, set a day before the first on April 6, 1928, Faulkner writes from the point of view of Jason, Quentin's cynical younger brother.

In this section we see Benjy's three passions: fire, his sister Caddy, and the golf course on land that used to belong to the Compson family.

But by 1928 Caddy has been banished from the Compson home after her husband divorced her because her child was not his, and the family has had to sell pastureland to a local golf club to finance Quentin's Harvard University education.

In the opening scene, Benjy, accompanied by Luster, a servant boy, watches golfers on the nearby golf course as he waits to hear them call "caddie"—the name of his favorite sibling.

We see him as a freshman at Harvard University, wandering the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, contemplating death, and remembering his family's estrangement from his sister Caddy.

He is obsessed with Southern ideals of chivalry and is strongly protective of women, especially his sister; he is horrified when she engages in sexual promiscuity.

It follows the course of Good Friday, a day on which Jason decides to leave work to search for Miss Quentin, who has run away, seemingly in pursuit of mischief.

This section also gives the clearest image of domestic life in the Compson household, with Jason and the servants caring for hypochondriac Caroline and disabled Benjy.

The family discovers that Miss Quentin has run away in the night with a carnival worker, having taken the strongbox in which Jason had hidden all his savings, both earned and stolen.

Jason suddenly appears, slaps Luster, turns the carriage around, and, in an attempt to quiet the sobbing, hits Benjy and breaks his flower stalk, screaming "Shut up!"

Luster turns around to look at Benjy and sees him holding his drooping flower, his eyes "empty and blue and serene again."

[4] At Faulkner's behest, subsequent printings of The Sound and the Fury frequently contain the appendix at the end of the book; it is sometimes referred to as the fifth part.

The appendix is presented as a complete history of the Compson family lineage, beginning with the arrival of their ancestor Quentin Maclachlan in America in 1779 and continuing through 1945, including events that transpired after the novel (which takes place in 1928).

In 1943, the librarian of Yoknapatawpha County discovered a magazine photograph of Caddy in the company of a German staff general and attempted separately to recruit Jason and Dilsey to save her: Jason, at first acknowledging that the photo was of his sister, denied it after realizing that the librarian wanted his help, while Dilsey pretended to be unable to see the picture at all.

[citation needed] When Faulkner began writing the story that would develop into The Sound and the Fury, it "was tentatively titled ‘Twilight,’ [and] narrated by a fourth Compson child," but as the story progressed into a larger work, he renamed it,[7] drawing its title from Macbeth's famous soliloquy from act 5, scene 5 of William Shakespeare's Macbeth: Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death.

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

Immediately obvious is the notion of a "tale told by an idiot," in this case Benjy, whose view of the Compsons' story opens the novel.

The last line is, perhaps, the most meaningful: Faulkner said in his Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech that people must write about things that come from the heart, "universal truths."

Upon publication the influential critic Clifton Fadiman dismissed the novel, arguing in The Nation that "the theme and the characters are trivial, unworthy of the enormous and complex craftsmanship expended on them.

"[8] But The Sound and the Fury ultimately went on to achieve a prominent place among the greatest of American novels, playing a role in William Faulkner's receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.

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.

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.