The Sound and the Fury

The Mysterious Love Story Of Miss Emily In “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner, Emily Grierson is not your average southern lady, this made her well-known in the small town of Jefferson. Miss Emily obsessed over love, gossip, and the dead bodies of the men that held a place in her heart. Mr. Grierson, Tobe, Homer Barron, Colonel Sartoris, and Judge Stevens, each of these men that was involved in Miss Emily’s life left a lasting impression. The first man that Emily Grierson laid her eyes…

The symbols of time and shadow play a major part in the novel, The Sound and the Fury. As a whole, these symbols represent the Compson’s fall from glory. As time passes since the days when the Compson family was in its heyday, the family slowly falls to ruin. Morals are lost in the flood of self-pity and self-absorption while the family bonds weaken and break. In the midst of the family’s decay, time and shadows take on different meanings for each of the characters. Quentin, running from his…

Sylvia Plath had a troubled life. She tried to commit suicide once, but failed. She ended up marrying and having two kids, but the marriage ended in divorce. She later tried to commit suicide again, this time she succeeded. As seen in the poem Mirror, if we aren’t content with our reflection or focus too much on finding ourselves through the mirror, we will end up losing ourselves and never find happiness, just like Plath. We need to find ourselves without looking in the mirror, because if…

William Faulkner is considered to be one of the greatest American authors in twentieth century. Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” is one of his best witting. The story is placed in Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi in 1930 (Akers, 2002). William Faulkner 's central theme of the story is to let go of the past. The main character of the story “A Rose for Emily” is Emily Grierson, who has a tendency to cling to the past. Faulkner uses symbols throughout the story to show the stubbornness of…

Animals are the most used symbols in As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. Animal symbolism is a common theme throughout many novels. William Faulkner uses symbolism to relate to ways characters look at each other. Faulkner uses animal imagery to illustrate the theme respect in the book As I Lay Dying. For example, shortly after the death of Addie, her youngest son Vardaman compares her dead mother with the fish he had caught. In the same way, for Darl, Jewel's horse is his mother. Finally the cow…

However, the theme most prevalent in The Sound and the Fury, is the communication, or its lack within the Compson family. All the uncertainties that surface in the lives of the family members are instigated through the lack of communication. Stephan Ross touches on this with his idea that Mr. Compson is constantly analyzing Quentin, "erecting a wall of words impossible to break through" (111). In one of the great ironies of the novel, Mr. Compson bombards his children with meaningless words…

In William Faulkner’s novel “The Sound and the Fury,” Faulkner employs specific forms of symbolism, imagery, and allegory to depict the corrupt aristocratic values held by the Compson family in order to portray the shifting social values seen in all of American aristocratic society in the South during the early twentieth century. While symbolism functions primarily to depict the traditional social values of the South, imagery is used to vividly illustrate the promiscuous behavior of women that…

These are the very lines from which the title of novel ‘The Sound and The Fury’ has been taken. These lines, from Macbeth of Shakespeare, are very much suitable for the story of Faulkner’s this novel. It has been claimed by many critics that the story reflects multiple aspects of Southern society of America in twentieth century. It puts light on almost all the aspects of a society i.e. religious dogmas, traditional values, cultural disintegration, liberalism and freedom of women in the society,…

In The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner intentionally denies Caddy, arguably the main character of the novel, a chance to speak for herself. In doing so he emphasizes how change is never heard, but its ripples are seen. Caddy who represents changing societal norms is only seen through the eyes of those experiencing her actions (changes in values). We never hear Caddy’s motives but we see the effects of her actions. Three different views come to pass as a result of Caddy’s actions and the…

In The Sound and the Fury, the myth of the Southern Belle is central to understanding the mental crisis Compson brothers experience that hinders their engagement with reality. In The Sound and the Fury, the Compsons, a disintegrating Southern aristocratic family mentally still living in the Old South, struggle with changing South and its conditions. In the novel, their only daughter Caddy’s virginity is a metaphor for the Old South; the role of the Southern belle is the role that Caddy is…