The Sound and the Fury读书报告.doc

Destruction and Renewal -The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner was born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, to a prominent Southern family. A number of his ancestors were involved in the Mexian-American War,the Civil War, and the Reconstruction, and were part of the local railroad industry and the political scene. Faulkner showed signs of artistic talent from a young age, but became bored with his classes and never finished high school.Faulkner grew up in the town of Oxford, Mississippi, and eventually returned there in his later years and purchased his famous estate, Rowan Oak. Oxford was faulkners inspiration for the fictional town of Jefferson, Mississippi, and its surrounding Yoknapatawpha Country. These locales became the setting for a number of his works. Faulkners “Yoknapatawpha novels” include the Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down, Moses (1942), and they feapure some of the same characters and locations.Faulkner was particularly interested in the decline of the Deep South after the Civil War. Many of his novels explore the deterioration of the Southern aristocracy after the destruction of its wealth and way of life during the Civil War and Reconstruction.Faulkners reputation as one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century is largely due to his highly experimental style. Faulkner was a pioneer in literary modernism, dramatically diverging from the forms and structures traditionally used in novels before his time. Faulkner often employs stream of consciousness narrative, discards any notion of chronological order, uses multiple narrators, shifts between the present and the past tense, and tends toward impossibly long and complex sentences. For his effort, As I Lay Dying was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949. He died in Mississippi in 1962.First published in 1929, the Sound and the Fury is recognized as one of the most successfully innovative and experimental American novels of its time, not to mention one of the most challenging to interpret. The novel concerns the downfall of the Compsons,a prominent family in Jefferson, Mississippi, since before the Civil War. Faulkner represents the human experience by portraying events and images subjectively, through several different characterss respective memories of childhood. It is generally regarded as Faulkners most important and remarkable literary work.The title of the Sound and the Fury is taken from Macbeths soliloquy in act 5, scene 5 of William Shakespeares Macbeth:“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrowCreeps in this petty pace from day to dayTo the last syllable of recorded time,And all our yesterdays have lighted foolsThe way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.Lifes but a walking shadow, a poor playerThat struts and frets his hour upon the stage,And then is heard no more. it is a taleTold by an idiot, full of sound and fury,Signifying nothing.”the Sound and the Fury literally begins as a“tale / told by an idiot, ” as the first chapter is narrated by the mentally disabled Benjy.The general outline of the story is the decline of the Compson family, a once noble Southern family descended from U.S. Civil War hero General Compson. The family falls victim to those vices which Faulkner believed were responsible for the problems in the reconstructed South: racism, avarice, selfishness, and the psychological inability of individuals to become determinants. Over the course of the thirty years or so related 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.In this novel, we can see this corruption running rampant in the Compson family. Mr. Compson has a vague notion of family honorbut is mired in his alcoholism and maintains a fatalistic belief that he cannot control the events that befall his family. Mrs. Compson is just as self-absorbed, wallowing in hypochondria and self-pity and remaining emotionally distant from his children. Quentins obsession with old Southern morality renders him paralyzed and unable to move past his familys sins. Caddy tramples on the Southern notion of feminine purity and indulges in promiscuity, as does her daughter. Jason wastes his cleverness on self-pity and greed, strving constantly for personal gain but with no higher aspirations. Benjy commits no real sins, but physically mainfests the Compsons deline through his retardation and his inability to differentiate between morality and immorality.The Compsons corruption of Southern values results in a household that is completely devoid of love, the force that once held the family together. Both parents are distant and ineffective. Caddy, the only child who shows an ability to love, is eventually disowned. Though Quentin loves Caddy, his love is neurotic,obsessive, and overprotective. None of the men experience any true romantic love, and are thus unable to marrry and carry on the family name.At the conclusion of the novel, Dilsey is the only loving member of the household, the only character who maintains her values without the corrupting influence of selfabsorption. Dilsey thus comes to represent a hope for the renewal of traditional Southern values in an uncorrupted and positive form. The novel ends with Dilsey as the torchbearer for these values, and, as such, the only hope for the preservation of the Compson legacy. So it must be recaptured for any Southern greatness to return.In this novel, Dilsey is the only real source of stab