This post is a part of The Great American Novel Challenge. If you’re interested in taking part in the challenge, feel free to jump right in next month.

I had an interesting experience while reading The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. It was the first novel I’ve read that I found both almost incomprehensible and extremely deep at the same time. I will explain this momentarily, but first let me talk about some background on why I chose this book. First, I would probably be remiss if I were to not read any Faulkner during this challenge. William Faulkner is widely regarded as one of the greatest American authors in history. As I Lay Dying was required reading at my high school, and although I can’t say it was my favorite book, it was interesting enough to warrant further investigation of the author.

Second, I have always believed that the Great American Novel would have a truly great title. I am familiar with the cliche that you can’t judge a book by its cover, and I am sure that this should extend to the title. However, book titles like The Sound and the Fury, A Movable Feast, The Grapes of Wrath, and Gravity’s Rainbow all simply beg to be read. How do you move a meal large enough to qualify as a feast? How wrathful could a bunch of grapes really be?

Third, although I knew very little about this book, I did know that it was a sort of precursor to the existentialism movement. I was taught about this in high school as well, but I never really understood much of it until years later. I think there are some important problems with existentialism, but it does serve to highlight one or two deep truths about the nature of humanity. For example, I believe that if human existence is genuinely alone (i.e. if there is no God), then life ultimately carries a devastating hopelessness and meaninglessness. Life without a reason for existence is bleak, and change seems to consistently and implicitly question human reasoning in this area.

Given that rationale, I picked up the book and started reading. I did no additional research into the plot, purpose, or history of the book, which may have been a bad decision, but at least it left me somewhat unbiased. The Sound and the Fury focuses on the Compton family, a southern clan living in the early 20th century. The first two sections are extremely difficult to read. The first section is written in a stream-of-consciousness style from the perspective of a child with a mental handicap. As you might imagine, this is somewhat jarring if you didn’t know that when you started reading the book. The second section uses the form and structure of the writing to reflect the emotional state of the main character. Again, this was quite confusing. The third section is easier to read, which reflects the mental and emotional state of the main character, but it too ultimately ends up full of ’sound and fury.’ It is also worth noting that most of the book is not written in chronological order, and much of the language (as with Uncle Tom’s Cabin) is conversational and colloquial English rather than grammatically correct or formal English.

The final section is the easiest to read and the most direct in conveying the purpose of the novel. I began to figure out much of what I failed to understand from the previous sections. Also, I became more aware of the purpose of the book. Quite honestly, this was probably too late in the book for me to get much out of it. I won’t give away then ending of the book, but I will say that after reading the fourth section, figuring out what Faulkner was trying to say, and – in particular – reading the ending of the book, I found myself wishing I had time to start over and try reading it again. There are almost certainly some fundamentally important aspects of the book that I missed completely the first time through and I suspect that I would enjoy re-reading the book to discover them.

Perhaps I am simply not ‘literary’ (the majority of my formal education has been in engineering and science) enough to have picked up the book with little prior knowledge of it and get something valuable from it. However, I believe such an experience in and of itself was valuable. I began to wonder how the context in which we read affects our understanding of what we read. In trying to figure out what it was that I read, I found that The Sound and the Fury was not immediately recognized as an important literary achievement. Was the context of the book’s initial release partly responsible for this? You can perform your own thought experiment on this by thinking about how you select a book to read. In my case, The Sound and the Fury was selected not from any understanding of the plot, purpose, or content of the book, but instead from the rules and context of the Great American Novel Challenge. This is certainly not my usual method of selecting books to read. For other books, I have a process that includes some synthesis of the plot, purpose, author, context, and probably many tacit metrics that I don’t consciously consider.

Several literary critics believe that Faulkner’s greatest achievement is The Sound and the Fury. I am not qualified to judge either of these since I have only read two of his books and since I have not yet read many other ‘great’ American authors. I can say that Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is more like an artifact to be studied than a novel to be read. Since I have only read it once, you’ll have to take my evaluation with a grain of salt. As such, the only way for me to evaluate The Sound and the Fury is to consider how “American” it is. It is certainly set in a quintessentially American location, the post-civil war south, but I can’t say that it discusses inherently American problems, dreams, or goals. It has probably affected world culture more than American culture, and I find it somewhat difficult to label it as a Great American Novel.

Three books down; ten to go!

My books in the challenge thus far are:
July 2009: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
August 2009: Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)
September 2009: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929)