The Sound and the Fury

A hallmark of modernist literature, the stream of consciousness narration is marked by a meandering, often repetitive, and free associative style of writing. It attempts to mimic the way in which the thought process itself unfolds. It is meant to immerse a reader in the character’s psychology and experience. This style of narration is typically full of sensory observations and non-linear references. It was an innovative literary device, pioneered by Faulkner and other writers of the early 20th century, including Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Its popularity has proved enduring, as it has been utilized by notable writers ever since, including Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, and Booker-prize winning authors like James Kelman and Salman Rushdie.

The other trademarks of stream of consciousness narration are a lack of syntactical regularity, with ungrammatical sentences and misspellings. A lack of punctuation—famously, the final chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses contains virtually no punctuation—is intended to reproduce the rush of thoughts and memories experienced by a character. The reader is swept along in the flow of the writer’s words with nothing to slow them down. Faulkner uses this style of narration in The Sound and the Fury to immerse the reader in the consciousness of three very different characters—the Compson brothers, Benjy, Quentin, and Jason.