ABSTRACT
The novel deviates in many ways from standard fictional treatments of the white, and also of the black, for the main narrative conflict is not any putative "negro" problem. Chaos appears in the first words of The Sound and the Fury. The language seems pure realism, yet we seem to lack a metalanguage governing our interpretation of these words. The tensions within the Compson family only underscore public tensions. Traces of unequal relations occur and recur in the speech of the main narrators of The Sound and the Fury, mitigated by a countervailing prose that, often against the speaker's wishes, dissolves these relations. One figure that pervades the speech and experience of Jason and Quentin involves actual or rhetorical acts of exchange and substitution. Time and space are also a kind of barrier. Benjy's "contiguity disorder" prevents him from having any investment in racist hierarchies.
