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The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner After publishing three novels in the 1920s, William Faulkner achieved an artistic breakthrough with The Sound and the Fury (1929). In this moving modernist novel about a doomed Southern family, he is less the modern novelist of consciousness than of divided consciousness. The psyches of all the characters, especially the three Compson brothers, are layered and conflicted. And Faulkner successfully wrestles with a variety of techniques, including poeticizing of pose, to reveal how the characters are often unaware of their unconscious desires and obsessions that subvert and undermine their conscious intentions. The Sound and the Fury is also characterized by a deep ambivalence and anxiety about masculine roles, about what it means to be a man in the modern period. Indeed, it depicts the crisis and failure of different conceptions of masculinity in a world where men are driven by profound feelings of inadequacy and impotence, where they violently control or reject women because they so desperately need them. -- Philip Cohen |
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