Another feature of The Sound and the Fury is that Faulkner uses multiple narrators. The novel is separated into four distinct sections, and each part has a narrator respectively.
The first, April 7, 1928, is written from the perspective of Benjy Compson. He is a 33-year-old man with severe mental handicaps. Through the youngest son’s eyes, we can see the situation of the world around the Compson and this family which at the verge of decline.
The second section, June 2, 1910, focuses on Quentin Compson, a young Harvard student and Bengy’s older brother, and the events leading up to his suicide. Faulkner describes this part in the perspective of Quentin. He tells readers about Quentin’s thinking, somniloquy, subconscious activities as well as his real life.
In the third section, April 6, 1928, Faulkner writes from the point of view of Jason, a bitter farm-supply store worker and Quentin’s cynical younger brother. Because of Caddy, Jason does not gain a job in the bank. He hates Caddy and her daughter, which fully demonstrates his selfish and avaricious state of his mind.
In the fourth and final section, set a day after the first, on April 8, 1928, Faulkner introduces a third person omniscient point of view. The last section primarily focuses on Dilsey, one of the Compson’s black servants who have played a great part in raising the children. Faulkner supplements the plot of the fiction with the observation and inner monologue of this black house cleaner. She embodies the “human” power.
2. Literature Review
Through finding and organizing information, there have been many critics doing research on Faulkner and The Sound and the Fury in the modern literature. Most of their works focused on psychological analysis, the relationship between the inpidual and the society and narrative techniques, including multi-angles and freedom of association of the novel. For example, Yang Feng’s “A Freudian psychoanalytic Interpretation of The Sound and the Fury”, Wang Yan’s “Inpidual VS Community: The cause of the inpidual tragedy in The Sound and the Fury” and Zhou Xiaofei’s “The coincidence of Form and Consciousness in The Sound and the Fury”.
Liao Jinluo analyzed the formation of Jason’s character from the perspective of post-modernism. He thought that Jason’s personalities were not formed when he was a child. They were not inherent and changeless. They can be acquired and constructed in daily life with the influences of economy, politics and culture.
There were also some thesis that are about archetypal analysis, but very few. For example, Li Xue’s “Biblical Factors in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury”. She researched it “on the basis of Northrop Frye’s theory on archetypal criticism, and with the base of association between the biblical archetypes on three aspects, such as theme, characters and image”.
Some scholars focused on narrative ambiguity in The Sound and the Fury. For example, Tian Ping and Hong Zengliu’s “On the Gradualness by the Narrative Ambiguity in The Sound and the Fury”. They focused on “ambiguous narrators’ narratives” (Tian Ping& Hong Zengliu 2012: 253-262), especially synchronized gradualness of Caddy. They illustrated rich and deep significance by elucidation of narrative gradualness on the basis of deconstruction and psycho-analyses.
Some critics concentrated on “time” in this novel. Feng Wenkun’s “On the Idea of Time Reflected in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury” is an example. He said that “the characters turn out to be the bearer or performer of the time”.（Feng Wenkun 2007: 131-136）He explained Faulkner’s idea of time and the sense of his characters in the light of Meileau Ponty’s philosophy of time –inter-subjectivity. Liang Zhen and Zhu Caixia analyzed the relationship between time and fate in The Sound and the Fury. They tried to analyze characters’ fate on the basis of Bergson’s “psychological time” in order to find Faulkner’s view of time. 浅析《喧嚣与骚动》中杰生性格形成的原因(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_58869.html