The Poverty of Apprehensive Search for Truth in William Faulkner’s <i>the Sound and the Fury</i>

Abstract

It is customary to look on The Sound and the Fury, the first of Faulkner’s major novels, as a socio-economic study of the decline of a post-bellum southern family. But such an interpretation is not adequate for the book is basically about ‘‘the elusiveness, the multi-valence of truth’’ in a world of individuals cut off from familial and cultural ties. This study is an attempt to bring to light the predicament of man by showing him as the prisoner of his own private consciousness, and seeks to show the individual’s persistent tendency to make of truth a personal thing. Each of the major characters interprets the given situation in his own way and apprehends some fragment of the truth which elaborates into ‘‘a total vision of the world.’’ What he seizes upon as the whole truth is ‘‘rigidly exclusive and hence utterly fallacious’’ (Millgate, 1966:298-89).

Keywords: poverty, apprehensive, truth, sound and fury, Faulkner,