The Fall of the Compson Family in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury Es

The Fall of the Compson Family in Faulkners The Sound and the FuryThat Faulkners title for his tangled The Sound and the Fury comes from Macbeth is common knowledge, and reading the novel only confirms Faulkners choice as sound. Certainly there is an almost constant desire to decapitate characters so as to quiet their almost constant bellering. The common theme critics identify in the novel is the terrible fall of the Southern aristocracy, yet I cannot help barely think that there was not, by that time, far to fall, at least not in the case of the Compson family. Faulkners modernist fiction supposedly speaks to the decease of the Old South, a decline encapsulated in the Compson familys trajectory of self-pity and tragedy. The implication is that this is a family well-entrenched in the aura of the Old South, which suffers a loss of prestige and valiance in the dark days following the literal and symbolic muddying of Caddys drawers. Indeed, with Quentins suicide, the last of the C ompson family, in terms of its past, is come to an end but not because his death is part of a lo...