The Sound and the Fury | Interpreting Caddy Compson

In this essay, Jeffrey M. Lilburn analyzes how each of the novel's narrations comes to focus on Caddy Compson. He notes that while a reader of The Sound and the Fury can only learn of Caddy through the observations of her family, interpreting her character is central to understanding the novel.

William Faulkner's fourth novel, The Sound and the Fury, is a haunting and sometimes bewildering novel that surprises and absorbs the reader each time it is read. The novel was Faulkner's personal favorite and, along with James Joyce's novel Ulysses and T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land, is generally thought to be one of the greatest works of literature in English of the twentieth century. The Sound and the Fury also signalled the beginning of the "major period" of Faulkner's own literary creativity; four of the five novels that...

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