As I began to read Lawrence Bowling's Article about Faulkner's writing technique in "The Sound and the Fury," I found myself excitingly anticipating receiving answers to my many questions concerning Faulkner's novel. Unfortunately, when reading Bowling's article, I found not answers but even more questions. Although Bowling does start his article by admitting the complexity of the novel, he goes on to explain that, "there is certainly nothing about the first two pages of this novel to entangle or frighten away the average reader." After stopping to re-read this sentence a few times, I came to the conclusion that Bowling was being utterly serious and in no way sarcastic like I had immediately concluded. Bowling goes on to explain his reasoning, "It is composed of simple words and much repetition; the basic structural unit is the simple sentence; the question mark and the exclamation point are reduced to the period."
While I agree that Benjy's narration style is incredibly simplistic, I cannot be in concordance with the fact that this type of narration makes the first few pages of the novel in any way easy to read. Bowling argues that the third page of the novel, when flashbacks and flash-forwards come into play, is the start of the difficult-to-understand essence of the book. Although I also agree that this part is rather confusing, I think that the fact that the reader is not conventionally introduced to the characters as well as the lack of conventional punctuation makes "The Sound and the Fury" confusing from the start. Benjy's simplistic language does not subtract from the overall confusing nature of the plot as a whole in my opinion.
Bowling does make a valid point when he describes the reasons for the reader's difficulty in understanding Benjy's narration, "since Benjy is not aware that we are eavesdropping his thoughts, it does not occur to him to explain things for our benefit" and "he could not explain anything if he tried, for he is incapable of the simplest abstraction." It had never before really occurred to me that I was in fact "eavesdropping" on Benjy's thoughts. It is apparent when reading the novel that what Benjy is thinking is making sense to himself, and after reading Bowling's article I now realize that Benjy is not in the least bit concerned with whether his thoughts make sense to others because as far as he is concerned, the reader does not exist.
"Faulker: Technique of 'The Sound and the Fury'" has placed different aspects of "The Sound and the Fury" in a new light for me. Although I agree with some of those aspects and disagree with others, I realize now that many of the questions I had while reading the novel itself simply do not have obvious answers.
Lawrence Edward Bowling
The Kenyon Review, Vol. 10, No. 4 (Autumn, 1948), pp. 552-566
