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The sound and the fury
By William Faulkner

The Sound and the Fury, published in October 1929, was Faulkner8217;s fourth novel. It tells the story from four different perspectives, of the disintegration of a Southern family. The father cynical and passive, drinks himself to death; the invalid mother has no love for her children and continuously demands that she herself be taken care of; Benjy, the mentally retarded son of whom his mother is ashamed, is castrated after he begins to exhibit sexual behaviour; Quentin, the neurotic and romantic son, goes off to Harvard to fulfill his mother8217;s lifelong wish and commits suicide there, and Caddy, the teenage daughter, becomes pregnant and quickly marries a man who turns her out of the house when he discovers that their child is not his. Now considered to be one of the strongest American contributions to the fiction of high modernism, it has generated countless critical interpretations.