Innovative Techniques In The Sound And The Fury
American Literature1900-1945
Innovative Techniques in The Sound and the Fury
The Sound and the Fury has been seen as an "example par excellence of modernist American fiction" (Cohen). Its publication represented a watershed in American literature as it introduced several modernist techniques among which: the destruction of chronological order, the division of the perspectives, the increased number of narrators, the free association technique, the stream of consciousness.
I have selected three fragments from the first three sections of the novel in order to highlight some of these new literary devices. Each fragment represents the corresponding narrator point of view about the event that marked the beginnig of the decline of the Compson family-Caddy's virginity loss.
The first fragment comes from the section "April 7th, 1928" where gradually we find out about the Compson tragedy. The narrator- Benjy a youngest son of the family, also a thirty-three year man afflicted by idiocy-has no concept of time or morality. Thus in his narration the present and the past fuse in indiscernible ways making the comprehension of the plot difficult to follow. Benjy's memories are blending with the present happenings or amalgamate with each other. The events are narrated in the present tense which renders whatever claim of chronology futile. He says that he could "hear the fire and the roof" and then he could "could hear Caddy walking fast" (Faulkner) in this way the clear shift from one memory to another is obscure. This is another innovative technique Faulkner used creating an apparent continuity on the surface of the narration by repeting certain phrases from one scene to another, a sort of harmony in chaos.
Beside the fragmentation of the traditional linear time, the author resort to another modernist device in order to capture the reader's attention: he doesn't fully depicts the events, he only alludes at them, we are only witnessing the characters reaction to...
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