Just Finished Reading The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

The Sound and the Fury, from 1929, is probably the most famous of American writer William Faulkner's novels.  Set as usual in a fictional locale within his home state of Mississippi, the story is presented from four separate viewpoints: Benjy, Quentin, Jason...brothers within the Compson family...and a third-person narration at the end very similar to Faulkner's style in the three other novels of his that I have read so far.  Three of the parts are set within a three-day period of April, 1928 while Quentin's necessarily goes back much further, to 1910 when he was attending college.  Through the "stream of consciousness" lenses of the three brothers...and finally through that of the "impartial" narrator...the reader supposedly can piece together the puzzle of what's really going on in their lives and their family: good luck with that!  Benjy is a severely intellectually-challenged man who sees everything literally, with his emotions springing up spontaneously in reaction.  Quentin is, on the other hand, intellectual and sensitive, spending much of his thoughts reliving past moments of his life and agonizing over them.  Jason is more, I believe, like most of us: rooted in the real moment like Benjy, but putting his own cynical editorial stamp on everything and everyone around him while excusing his own questionable behavior as a matter of habit.  The central character, Caddie...sister to these three brothers...gets no narration but is revealed by the attitudes of her siblings.  Family honor, apparently a big thing within Southern white families of slaveholding lineage, gets a lot of treatment here as Caddie's mother feels scandalized by her daughter first becoming pregnant out of wedlock and then being abandoned by her husband.  Benjy is unaware of any of this and only wants his sister back, Quentin feels extreme guilt and personalizes it all, and Jason scorns and ostracizes his sister while secreting away the support payments she makes for her daughter, also named Quentin.  It's a pretty big mess with a lot of miserable people stuck in their own heads...the mother is a perennial, manipulative hypochondriac and causes much of the family division.  Only Caddie and the Compsons' black employees and family seem to think rationally and act in a socially functional manner.  I was fascinated with how Faulkner used this stream of consciousness approach to divide the population into these three types: the literalist Benjy, the neurotic, fantasizing Quentin, and the cynical, rationalizing Jason.  And then then there is Dilsey, the family's housekeeper and her own family's matriarch, who is the one unrecognized person in the story who keeps both the Compsons and her own together and functioning. In the first two narratives the reader finds himself often instantly transported back and forth in time as the protagonists relive moments from their pasts...Jason's, though, as I earlier said, is rooted in the present real world (of 1928).  The Sound and the Fury is loaded with racism and racist epithets...not from Faulkner's beliefs, but rather from the characters and social climate he tried to realistically depict  from life in rural Mississippi in the early twentieth century.  If you can get past all the "N" words...and it can get overbearing at times...this novel might provide an interesting reading challenge...