The Sound and the Fury读书报告

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Destruction and Renewal

-------The Sound and the Fury

William Faulkner was born in 1897 in New Albany, Miiippi, to a prominent Southern family.A number of his ancestors were involved in the Mexian-American War,the Civil War, and the Reconstruction, and were part of the local railroad industry and the political scene.Faulkner showed signs of artistic talent from a young age, but became bored with his claes and never finished high school.Faulkner grew up in the town of Oxford, Miiippi, and eventually returned there in his later years and purchased his famous estate, Rowan Oak.Oxford was faulkner’s inspiration for the fictional town of Jefferson, Miiippi, and its surrounding Yoknapatawpha Country.These locales became the setting for a number of his works.Faulkner’s “Yoknapatawpha novels” include the Sound and the Fury(1929), As I Lay Dying(1930), Light in August(1932), Absalom, Absalom!(1936), The Hamlet(1940), and Go Down, Moses(1942), and they feapure some of the same characters and locations.Faulkner was particularly interested in the decline of the Deep South after the Civil War.Many of his novels explore the deterioration of the Southern aristocracy after the destruction of its wealth and way of life during the Civil War and Reconstruction.Faulkner’s reputation as one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century is largely due to his highly experimental style.Faulkner was a pioneer in literary modernism, dramatically diverging from the forms and structures traditionally used in novels before his time.Faulkner often employs stream of consciousne narrative, discards any notion of chronological order, uses multiple narrators, shifts between the present and the past tense, and tends toward impoibly long and complex sentences.For his effort, As I Lay Dying was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949.He died in Miiippi in 1962.First published in 1929,the Sound and the Fury is recognized as one of the most succefully innovative and experimental American novels of its time, not to mention one of the most challenging to interpret.The novel concerns the downfall of the Compsons,a prominent family in Jefferson, Miiippi, since before the Civil War.Faulkner represents the human experience by portraying events and images subjectively, through several different characters’s respective memories of childhood.It is generally regarded as Faulkner’s most important and remarkable literary work.The title of the Sound and the Fury is taken from Macbeth's soliloquy in act 5, scene 5 of William Shakespeare's Macbeth: “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time, And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death.Out, out, brief candle.Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more.it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.”

the Sound and the Fury literally begins as a“tale / told by an idiot, ” as the first chapter is narrated by the mentally disabled Benjy.The general outline of the story is the decline of the Compson family, a once noble Southern family descended from U.S.Civil War hero General Compson.The family falls victim to those vices which Faulkner believed were responsible for the problems in the reconstructed South: racism, avarice, selfishne, and the psychological inability of individuals to become determinants.Over the course of the thirty years or so related in the novel, the family falls into financial ruin, loses its religious faith and the respect of the town of Jefferson, and many of them die tragically.In this novel, we can see this corruption running rampant in the Compson family.Mr.Compson has a vague notion of family honor—but is mired in his alcoholism and maintains a fatalistic belief that he cannot control the events that befall his family.Mrs.Compson is just as self-absorbed, wallowing in hypochondria and self-pity and remaining emotionally distant from his children.Quentin’s obseion with old Southern morality renders him paralyzed and unable to move past his family’s sins.Caddy tramples on the Southern notion of feminine purity and indulges in promiscuity, as does her daughter.Jason wastes his cleverne on self-pity and greed, strving constantly for personal gain but with no higher aspirations.Benjy commits no real sins, but physically mainfests the Compsons’ deline through his retardation and his inability to differentiate between morality and immorality.The Compsons’ corruption of Southern values results in a household that is completely devoid of love, the force that once held the family together.Both parents are distant and ineffective.Caddy, the only child who shows an ability to love, is eventually disowned.Though Quentin loves Caddy, his love is neurotic,obseive, and overprotective.None of the men experience any true romantic love, and are thus unable to marrry and carry on the family name.At the conclusion of the novel, Dilsey is the only loving member of the household, the only character who maintains her values without the corrupting influence of self—absorption.Dilsey thus comes to represent a hope for the renewal of traditional Southern values in an uncorrupted and positive form.The novel ends with Dilsey as the torchbearer for these values, and, as such, the only hope for the preservation of the Compson legacy.So it must be recaptured for any Southern greatne to return.In this novel, Dilsey is the only real source of stability in the Compson household.She is the person I like most.Because she is very patient and selfle—she cooks, cleans, and takes care of the Compson children in Mrs.Compson’s absence.Dilsey seems to be the only person in the household truly concerned for the Compson children’s welfare and character, and treats all of the children with love and fairne,even Benjy.So we can sense that Dilsey is the new torchbear of the Compson legacy, and represents the only hope for resurrecting the values of the old South in a pure and uncorrupted form.Though the Compson family has fallen, Dilsey represents amsurce of hope.