ABSTRACT
Those who read Mr. William Faulkner's Soldiers' Pay will in some measure be prepared for the poignant and bewildering experiences offered by The Sound and the Fury. It is not a book for every novel reader; indeed, I think Mr. Faulkner should consider himself lucky if he finds a hundred discerning readers in this country. But he may console himself with the thought that Ulysses had considerably fewer genuine appreciators on its first appearance. I am not going to insist too strongly on a parallel between The Sound and the Fury and Ulysses; but the influence of Mr. James Joyce is so strongly marked on the first hundred pages of Mr. Faulkner's new novel that one cannot let it pass without specialnotice. In my opinion TheSound and the Fury is an even tougher proposition for the general novel reader than Ulysses. To begin with, its outline is less strongly drawn and the emotions in which it deals are not so universal. Nevertheless, Mr. Faulkner's book, however strange and obscure it may appear, is one of the most important experiments in creative form and approach I have read for ten years; I hesitate in saying one ofthe most important achievements only because -although I have read the book twice-I have not yet completely grasped its inner significance.Laying the book aside for a second time, I feel that I have passed through one of the strangest experiencesofmy life-an experience which can only be paralleled in actual life by walking through a darkness which is lit fitfully by an electric storm and from which isolated figures emerge for a moment and disappear. That is precisely the effect the first part of the book left upon me. The early introduction to the narrative is made by Benjy, a congenital imbecile of thirty-three who has no time sense and who reacts naively to the surging of memory from a timeless flood of experiences. It is, I think, quite impossible, to disentangle any clear lines of movement or any consistent action from Benjy's wanderings; but characters now and then stand out with an almost supra-natural power, as, for instance, the sister, Candy, a superb sketch in idiot chiaroscuro. From Benjy we are taken back eighteen years and plunged into the last day of a young
