Friday Explorations Read Aloud: "The Sound and the Fury" by William Faulkner, Read by Joseph Coté
3Every Friday, at 11:00 am, on the library’s YouTube Channel and Facebook Page, the library will stream a brand new recording of local thespian, Joseph Coté reading aloud selections from a wide variety of fascinating and entertaining books of fiction and non-fiction.
For January 5, Coté will read aloud from William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury.
Winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature
Summary: The Sound and the Fury is set in the postbellum American South, in the period after Reconstruction (1865–77).
At this critical moment in American history, the South was in the process of redefining itself and its values in the absence of slavery. Certain Southern families (typically old landed families) refused to participate in this process. Instead, they turned inward; they clung to their traditions and values—to vague notions of honor, purity, and virginity.
The book details the destruction and downfall of the aristocratic Compson family from four different points of view.
The family members, as Faulkner casts them, are direct descendants of the planter-aristocrats. They are the inheritors of their values and traditions, on whom the survival (or ultimate extinction) of this Southern aristocracy depends.
The Compsons, for the most part, shirk this responsibility. At the end of the novel, the family is in ruins and, on a larger scale, so is the Southern aristocracy.
The Sound and the Fury’s form is distinctly Modernist: Faulkner employs a number of narrative techniques, including unreliable narrators, interior monologues, and unconventional syntax.
The title of Faulkner’s novel alone expresses Faulkner’s concern with time. The Sound and the Fury takes its name from a soliloquy given by the title character of William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth. In that soliloquy, Macbeth reflects on time and the meaninglessness of life.
With this classic American novel Faulker places himself well within the Modernist genre with Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot.
The Sound and the Fury has achieved a prominent place among the greatest of American novels, playing a role in William Faulkner’s receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Thoughts to share? Book ideas to suggest?
Leave a comment below or contact Joseph at friday-explorations@usa.net