The following are important general links to aid your progression through the novel. Use them as necessary to aid your general comprehension so that you can better investigate the themes, symbols, and perspectives presented in the book.
Activity Instructions: Using the following websites, explore one aspect of or perspective on Faulkner's life and the culture of the South. You might find the Document Analysis Worksheets useful for this activity.
“Colored Ink” Exercise Instructions:
Review the following passage (you should already have read at least past this section of the novel prior to this exercise). Faulkner once said that he would like to use colored ink to detail different shifts of time and thought in The Sound and the Fury, particularly for Benjy’s section. Read the passage, taken from the hypertext version of The Sound and the Fury, available through the EDSITEment reviewed Internet Public Library (the text corresponds to text from page 11 of the Norton Critical Edition, 2nd edition). Note any words or ideas that don’t make sense to you. Then, using highlighters (if you are working on printed paper), or the Hightlighter Tool if you choose to copy the text to a word processing program, “color” the text in a manner that you think shows shifts in Benjy’s perception of time, memory, or ideas. Once you are done, answer the questions that follow, explaining your choice by using evidence from the text.
Read the first part of “On The Sound and the Fury: Time in the Work of Faulkner” by Jean-Paul Sartre, available via University of Saskatchewan’s Department of English’s Faulkner pages. Read only the first part, up to the passage “The time of Benjy, the idiot, who does not know how to tell time, is also clockless.”
As you prepare to read the Quentin chapter, chart time and time shifts by tracking on the “Symbols as Time Triggers” Worksheet the key symbols that jumpstart Quentin’s “process of fragmentary recollections.” You will refer to these worksheets during a small group exercise during class.
Instructions for Worksheet: As you are reading the Quentin chapter, pay attention to the following recurring symbols:
On the worksheet, mark at least three page references per symbol, and indicate if the time is past time (Quentin’s adolescence) or present time (Harvard time). Take notes and/or write down questions to bring to class.
As your group discusses the symbols and their relationship to time in Quentin’s chapter, consider the following questions:
Instructions: Point of View in The Sound and the Fury
Use the following chart to note characteristics about each narrator’s individual style. How would you describe it? What does how they speak reveal about themselves and their family? And what is the effect of the style on you as a reader?
Continue filling in the chart—and the Dilsey/narrator row—once you read the fourth chapter of the novel.
Instructions: The Changing South
Not only does the Jason chapter reveal the final stages of the Compson’s family’s decline, but it also portrays the changing South—economically, technologically, and socially. Individually, or in small groups, explore these topics by conducting online using the links listed below.
Blood/The Old South: The significance of flesh and blood and the importance of Southern family heritage. Review the Compson family tree. Then, read the following passages from pages 20 through 34 of “The Old South” , an editorial written by H.M. Hamill (1847-1915) in the early 20th century, where he highlights differences he sees between the people and customs from the Old and New South. Hamill clearly laments the loss of the Old South, and—despite his protests—the institution of slavery itself. Yet his commentary illuminates certain thematic elements crucial to The Sound and the Fury—wealth, blood, family, slavery and bondage, and the role of African-Americans after the abolition of slavery.
This Old South aristocracy was of threefold structure—it was an aristocracy of wealth, of blood, and of honor. It was not the wealth of the shoddy aristocracy that here and there, even in the New South, has forced itself into notice and vulgarly flaunts its acquisitions. It came by inheritance of generations chiefly, as with the nobility of England and France. Only in the aristocracy of the Old World could there be found a counterpart to the luxury, the ease and grace of inherited wealth, which characterized the ruling class of the Old South. There were no gigantic fortunes as now, and wealth was not increased or diminished by our latter-day methods of speculation or prodigal and nauseating display. The ownership of a broad plantation, stately country and city homes, of hundreds of slaves, of accumulations of money and bonds, passed from father to children for successive generations. (20-21)
[. . .]
His aristocracy of wealth was as nothing compared to his aristocracy of blood. An old family name that had held its place in the social and political annals of his State for generations was a heritage vastly dearer to him than wealth. Back to the gentle-blooded Cavaliers who came to found this Western world, he delighted to trace his ancestry. There could be no higher honor to him than to link his name with the men who had planted the tree of liberty and made possible a great republic. (24)
Read from page 30, beginning:
"SIDE by side with the aristocrat, waiting deferentially to do his bidding, with a grace and courtliness hardly surpassed by his master, I place the negro servant of the Old South"
to this concluding paragraph on page 33:
“Whenever you find a negro whose education comes not from books and college only, but from the example and home teaching and training of his white master and mistress, you will generally find one who speaks the truth, is honest, self-respecting and self-restraining, docile and reverent, and always the friend of the Southern white gentleman and lady. Here and there in the homes of the New South these graduates from the school of slavery are to be found in the service of old families and their descendants, and the relationship is one of peculiar confidence and affection . . .”
Jason’s Greed: Not only was Jason stealing the money Caddy sent for Quentin by cashing the checks for himself; he was “speculating” (gambling) at the Western Union on the cotton stock market. Review the following passage:
back to town. I went to the bank and deposited the check and the money order and the other ten, and stopped at the telegraph office. It was one point above the opening. I had already lost thirteen points, all because she had to come helling in there at twelve, worrying me about that letter.
"What time did that report come in?" I says.
"About an hour ago," he says.
"An hour ago?" I says. "What are we paying you for?" I says. "Weekly reports? How do you expect a man to do anything? The whole dam top could blow off and we'd not know it."
"I dont expect you to do anything," he says. "They changed that law making folks play the cotton market."
"They have?" I says. "I hadn't heard. They must have sent the news out over the Western Union."
I went back to the store. Thirteen points. Dam if I believe anybody knows anything about the dam thing except the ones that sit back in those New York offices and watch the country suckers come up and beg them to take their money. Well, a man that just calls shows he has no faith in himself, and like I say if you aren't going to take the advice, what's the use in paying money for it. Besides, these people are right up there on the ground; they know everything that's going on. I could feel the telegram in my pocket. I'd just have to prove that they were using the telegraph company to defraud. That would constitute a bucket shop. And I wouldn't hesitate that long, either. Only be damned if it doesn't look like a company as big and rich as the Western Union could get a market report out on time. Half as quick as they'll get a wire to you saying Your account closed out. But what the hell do they care about the people. They're hand in glove with that New York crowd. Anybody could see that.
Explore the following links related to the New York Stock Exchange:
Jason’s Symbolic Car
Turn to the EDSITEment-reviewed Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History’s virtual exhibition “America on the Move.” Explore in particular the following chapters of the exhibition:
African-Americans in the Old and New South
The Sound and the Fury is set during the time of Jim Crow laws, which legally maintained segregation and generated racism and Southern white hatred toward African-Americans. Explore the following resources as you consider the transition from the Old South to the New South.
href="http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/tools.html">“The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow.”
See in particular “Voting Then and Now” and “Racial Realities.”Instructions:Remember to complete the Dilsey / Narrator portion of the chart from Jason’s chapter:
Time and Faulkner: Examine this 2D graph of Chronological and Narrative time, available as part of the supporting materials from the hypertext edition of The Sound and the Fury. This graph shows that Chronological time in the novel puts Benjy’s beginning chapter in the middle of Easter weekend (April 7), preceded by Jason (April 6) and followed by the narrator of the fourth chapter (April 8) on Easter Sunday. As the note on the graph indicates, Faulkner situates the action of the novel in medias res, or “into the middle of things” by beginning with Benjy’s chapter.
Next, turn to the 3D graph of Time, also available from the hypertext edition of The Sound and the Fury. Note the blue line, which reveals that amount of time each character spends in reflection on the past through memories and flashbacks. Easter Sunday is when Dilsey declares that now she “sees de endin.”