ABSTRACT
In 1929, William Faulkner published The Sound and the Fury, his example par excellence of modernist American fiction. Jason Lycurgus Compson, Quentin's great-great grandfather, is no aristocratic cavalier from the school of moonlight and magnolia but rather a gambler, a sharper, and an opportunist. The rise and fall of the House of Compson described in the Appendix is reminiscent of similar parabolic trajectories traversed by the fictional Sutpen and McCaslin families. Given the circumstances surrounding the genesis of the Compson Appendix, it should come as no surprise that it and the 1929 Sound and the Fury contradict each other in ways far more significant than the minor discrepancies readers have heretofore noticed. That The Sound and the Fury's textual instability has had a significant impact on discussion of the novel makes the task of constructing a scholarly edition of it based on the available texts all the more crucial.
