Review: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

 

Review: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

With reflections on Casey Cep’s introduction and Faulkner’s racial legacy

Reading The Sound and the Fury is like tumbling down a well into someone else’s madness—brilliant, disorienting, and claustrophobic. William Faulkner’s 1929 novel is widely considered a masterwork of literary modernism, and it earns that title with its shattered chronology, fractured voices, and poetic density. Faulkner demands that the reader abandon logic and surrender to rhythm, memory, and emotion. I admire the brilliance of what he accomplished. But as the father of two Black sons, I found reading this book almost unbearable.

My edition included a powerful introduction by New Yorker critic Casey Cep. She writes:

“Faulkner loved Mississippi in the way that only someone who has given his whole life to a place can love it—without irony, without detachment, and without apology. That love gives his novels their power and also their poison.”

That passage stayed with me more than anything in the novel itself. Because Faulkner’s love for Mississippi is everywhere in this book—not just its trees and rivers, but its hierarchies, its violence, its unspoken rules. He does not celebrate racism, but he lives inside it, unchallenged. The Black characters in The Sound and the Fury—Dilsey most of all—are relegated to the edges, mute supports for the crumbling white Compson family. Faulkner offers them no interiority, no freedom, no choice. And yet he mourns the Compsons like a tragic fall from grace.

What grace?

Faulkner once said, “If it came to fighting, I’d fight for Mississippi against the United States, even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes.” Later, he tried to walk that back, but the damage was done. That loyalty—to a world built on subjugation—makes it impossible for me to embrace him, no matter how intricate his prose or how inventive his narrative structure.

There are moments of undeniable power. Benjy’s disordered narration captures the chaos of loss with brutal immediacy. Quentin’s suicide unspools in a voice haunted by honor and failure. Jason, the bitter misogynist and racist, is Faulkner’s clearest indictment of the postbellum Southern man—mean, empty, desperate. And Dilsey, the Black servant, is portrayed with dignity, even if she is denied agency.

But dignity is not justice.

Reading Faulkner, I could never shake the feeling that I was inside a eulogy for a world I would never want my sons to live in. A world where their safety, their futures, and their very humanity would be conditional—if acknowledged at all.

I’m glad I read The Sound and the Fury. I understand why it is studied and revered. But Faulkner’s genius walks hand in hand with his blind spots. As Casey Cep notes, his love for Mississippi was both his strength and his undoing. For me, that’s too steep a price.

Brilliance, when rooted in a poisoned soil, can still grow thorns.