Faulkner, William - The sound and the fury

William Faulkner – The sound and the fury: main characteristics and style

William Faulkner is one of the leading figures in American twentieth-century fiction, particularly in the narrative between the two wars.
One of his most famous novels is "The Sound and the Fury", which was published in 1929, the year of Wall Street's stock market crash.
The book tells a story of violence and desolation of which is the protagonist of a family in the South of the United States.

The novel is set in the era of the onset of the great economic crisis that in those years was beginning to mark the decline of the American dream of prosperity and well-being.
William Faulkner uses an innovative and experimental technique: in the story, three brothers in the family tell of the affairs that concern them in first person, each from their own point of view.
The reality, filtered from their prospects, seems elusive indecipherable. It is only with the fourth part of the novel written in a third person focusing on the family's home-maid that the array of events unfolds and provides the interpretative key that allows to rebuild the plot.
Such a complex narrative technique that does not present the events in their chronological order and confuses the temporal plans with the continuous passage from past to present, seems to want to reproduce the chaotic magma of a reality that subtracts every rational and unambiguous understanding reflected in the crisis of Human society and human condition during the twentieth century.