TIME, RISE AND DOOM IN WILLIAM FAULKNER'S THE SOUND AND THE

FURY

Although being very complex and demanding to read, the novel The Sound and the
Fury is one of the most popular works written in the past century and it is still eagerly read
even today. On over three hundred pages of his fourth book, named after a line from
Shakespeare's Macbeth, William Faulkner, who grew up in Mississippi, tells the reader a story
about calamity of the American South and its distorted struggle with new social and political
trends spreading from the North. The Compsons represent archetypical literary portrayal of an
American family entangled in the post Civil War Old South's evanescence and its survival in
the industrialized world. Therefore strange embroidery of haunting past, unbearable present
and foggy future takes place as the central motif in this novel.
After the Civil War (1861 - 1865) and a bloody trace of hundreds of thousands of
casualties that was left after it, the Reconstruction era of the United States took place,
abolishing slavery and rapidly changing series of federal and state policies. While Northerners
saw it as the beginning of a new age of economic and cultural prosperity, Southerners could
hardly see anything positive in a severe defeat of their values and beliefs. Defiant preservation
of rusty tradition that generated a peculiar hybrid of an old-fashioned prestige and current
despair made the people of the ex-Confederate countries frustrated and hopeless. With the

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characters of Dilsey Gibson and Quentin Compson III, Faulkner displays to the reader two
contradictory perceptions of the world and time; one that is neurotic and obsessed with
progress and the other that transcends it all. In some way this divergence of attitudes towards
named problems symbolizes the conflict of Western fetish for mechanical rationality and
Eastern affection for mysticism. It is well known that the North and the West are
contemporary synonyms for developed areas found on ration while the South and the East
represent lingering spheres where one can get an impression that the time has stopped. Also,
throughout the centuries nations from the former areas enslaved and colonized people from
the latter ones.
Hindu philosophy holds that the Universe goes through repeated cycles of creation,
destruction and rebirth. As opposed to that the teaching of Christianity is characterized with
the belief in the linear progression of time that leads to the realization of the Kingdom of
Heaven. Time has always had a privileged place in European and American civilizations.
Overjoyed with the French Revolution German philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel also believed
in the gradual perfection of human society. However, after the twentieth century had begun
with the first global war, ideological turmoil, and economic collapse, some writers, like
Faulkner and Hemingway, perceived past as strong and unchangeable, a burden that deeply
affects present. While Puritan authors wrote about magnificent days that tomorrow will bring,
and transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau heartily believed that human beings can
surpass their flaws, modernists saw nothing but an abyss in front of them. The great line of a
linear progression ended in the cataclysm of the modern age.
Faulkner killed time as a constant entity; it became a matter of personal view. Being
trapped in it Quentin, who aspired to be like an industrious men of the North i.e. West, could
not endure disappearance of the glorious past. Annoyed by the constant ticking of his
unbreakable watch he stepped into the uncertain future and died. On the other hand, Dilsey,
just like Zen Buddhists of the East, never preoccupied herself with the manipulation of time in
her advantage. She always lived in peace with it and became a torchbearer of the present.

Luka Pejić
April 2009