Since Caddy’s loss of virginity represents the lost glory of Quentin’s family, the incessant chiming of clocks and the ticking of his grandfather’s watch become a representation of the fall he cannot avoid. Time is Quentin’s obsession, and he is unable to stop it from passing.

Faulkner can do this by drawing unexpected and moving parallels between the present and the past. Since the narrators are all inconsistent in some way, their stories are not always truthful, and any accurate analysis of the story is made challenging by its interweaving and nonlinear structure.īy changing the timeline of the story in the middle of a paragraph to move the years back or forward, Faulkner gives Benjy the impression that he is experiencing things through his own eyes. Since time means nothing to him, it will be difficult for readers to follow his mental ramblings and decipher what initially appears to be his jumbled thoughts. Benjy’s story abruptly transitions from the past to the present and back again. In ‘The Sound and the Fury’, time permeates everything, yet it also confuses readers as well as characters. The Concept of Time, Past and Present in The Sound and the Fury The overall deterioration of the Compson family and each member is thus symbolized by this subject. William Faulkner fashioned the title of the book ‘The Sound and the Fury’ from the Shakespearean play ‘Macbeth’ where the speaker bemoans the futility of a person’s life in the face of history’s and time’s unrelenting march.

The sound and the fury text