Posts Tagged ‘stream of consciousness’

The Sound and the Fury

Sunday, July 5th, 2015 | Books

Sometimes I can make it quite a way into a novel before I can work out what it is actually about. Very occasionally, I get the whole way through. This is one of those times.

For the first chapter, I wouldn’t even work out who the characters work. I thought they might be anthropomorphised animals. It eventually turned out they were children. That is about all I got until I read through the Wikipedia article.

It reminds me a lot of Ulysses and indeed does use the stream of consciousness narrative employed by Joyce. However, unlike Joyce, who paints a beautiful and linguistically-inspiring picture which his rambles, William Faulkner failed to capture my imagination, leaving only the barely-intelligible plot.

From a literary perspective, it is certainly interesting. However, it ranks 6th on Modern Library’s list of 100 best novels. Is that justified on a list that puts The Grapes of Wrath at 10th and Nineteen Eighty-Four at 14th? No.

The-Sound-and-the-Fury