Meaning Out Of Form

The Sound and the Fury is Faulkner’s first endeavor on the experiment with narrative styles, he has employed various techniques such as stream of consciousness and multiple focalizations in the novel. Endowed with the characteristic of modernism, The Sound and the Fury is also deemed as the quintessential American high modernist text.This thesis aims to approach the novel from narratology by studying the temporal and the spatial form of the novel in order to shed light on the meanings behind. The temporal form of the first three sections of the novel is analyzed according to the three aspects of temporality: order, duration and frequency, and thus the author illustrates that the temporal form signifies each character’s understanding on time. The spatial form of the novel is characterized by the combination of internal focalization and external focalization. In each of the first three sections we are forced to see through the eyes respectively of the three sons of the Compson family, while in the fourth section we adopt a detached third-person point of view. Through the exploration of the multiple focalizations, the author attempts to unveil the loss of Caddy, the collapse of the Compson family and the decay of the American South concealed in the spatial form.