The Sound and the Fury

Reading Check and Short Answer Questions on key points are designed for guided reading assignments, in-class review, formative assessment, quizzes, and more.

PART 1

Reading Check

1. What is Benjy’s legal first name?

2. In what year do the story’s present-time events take place?

3. Who is the family employee charged with Benjy’s care in the present-time narrative?

4. How old is Benjy in the present-time narrative?

5. After whom did Caddy name her daughter?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.

1. How does Faulkner structure Benjy’s narrative to reflect his relationship with time?

2. What do the golfers say that agitates Benjy, and why does he have this reaction?

3. What was Benjy’s mother’s original plan for his long-term care after her death, and why will this plan no longer work?

4. What is ironic about the change in Benjy’s name, considering what is implied by the incident with the letter to Mrs. Patterson?

5. What incident leads to Benjy’s castration?

Paired Resource

“What is an Unreliable Narrator?“

• This 6-minute video from Oregon State University defines and explains the literary concept of the unreliable narrator.
• This resource relates to the themes of Pride Before the Fall, Women’s Sexuality and Sexual Transgression, and Identity, Legacy, and Destiny.
• What are the qualities that make Benjy an unreliable narrator? How do his strengths and weaknesses as a narrator impact the reader’s understanding of Caddy? How do his characteristics contribute to the development of themes related to identity, family pride, and legacy?

“Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow“ by William Shakespeare

• This Macbeth soliloquy is the source of Faulkner’s novel’s title.
• This resource relates to the themes of Pride Before the Fall and Identity, Legacy, and Destiny.
• Faulkner alludes to this speech in the novel’s title. What is the title’s meaning, and how is that meaning similar to or different from Shakespeare’s original meaning of the phrase? How do the combination of the novel’s title and the choice to begin with Benjy’s narration position the reader to understand the rest of the narratives?

“The Necessity of Benjy as an Opening Narrator in The Sound and the Fury”

• This article from Southeast Missouri State University’s “Teaching Faulkner Newsletter” discusses potential reasons for Faulkner’s choices in making Benjy the first voice the reader hears. Due to its complexity and the presence of plot spoilers, this resource is intended as a teacher-facing resource.

Digital Yoknapatawpha

• This site, maintained by the University of Virginia, offers interactive map resources related to Faulkner’s work. Click on the image of The Sound and the Fury for resources specific to this novel; this series of brief videos is helpful in understanding how to use the site’s maps in teaching the novel. Due to their complexity and the presence of plot spoilers, the resources at this site are intended as a teacher-facing resource.

PART 2

Reading Check

1. Where is Quentin when he narrates Part 2?

2. What inherited object does Quentin deliberately break?

3. What kind gesture of Quentin’s ends up getting him in trouble with Julio and the law?

4. What does Quentin blame for his own misery and Caddy’s sexual transgressions?

5. Which friend does Quentin physically fight with on the day Part 2 takes place?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.

1. What topic does Quentin most frequently think about throughout Part 2?

2. Which of Quentin’s beliefs does he realize is unfounded after moving North?

3. How does Quentin’s reaction to Caddy’s pregnancy differ from his father’s?

4. What general philosophy of Mr. Compson’s regarding human experience does Quentin find impossible to accept?

5. Why is it ironic that Quentin is unable to follow through on the pact that he proposes to Caddy?

Paired Resource

“Analysis: How Did the Patriarchy Start—and Will Evolution Get Rid of It?”

• Anthropologist Ruth Mace of University College, London, explains the roots of patriarchy in this article.
• This resource relates to the themes of Women’s Sexuality and Sexual Transgression and Identity, Legacy, and Destiny.
• What connections do you see between patriarchy and the Compsons’ attitudes toward Caddy? Why might the family have held on particularly tightly to these traditional attitudes? What insights does Mace give into the peculiar and complex feelings that Quentin has for Caddy?

“Nihilism vs. Existentialism vs. Absurdism—Explained and Compared”

• This 14-minute video from The Living Philosophy explores how questions about life’s meaning result in nihilism, existentialism, and absurdism.
• This resource relates to the themes of Pride Before the Fall and Identity, Legacy, and Destiny.
• Which of these philosophical ideas best represent Mr. Compson’s beliefs? Why does Quentin find these ideas threatening? How do the different positions that Quentin and his father take about life’s meaning and human values relate to the novel’s larger concerns with Southern culture and the decline of the Compson family?

PART 3

Reading Check

1. Which Compson family members live in the household during Jason’s narration?

2. What do Jason and Miss Quentin argue about in the car?

3. From whom does Jason receive a letter?

4. What job does Jason do to earn money for the family?

5. What does Jason burn simply to be cruel to Luster?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.

1. What is Jason angry at Miss Quentin for, and what does he intend to do about her transgressions?

2. What events does Jason believe have tarnished the family’s reputation?

3. What can the reader infer about how Miss Quentin came to live with the Compsons?

4. What threat does Jason use to keep Caddy from trying to contact Benjy?

5. What dishonest scheme has Jason used to support his mistress and buy himself things?

Paired Resource

“Condition of the South: Nature of Its Aristocracy Its Influence on Politics Its Progress or Destruction Necessary Its Consequent Unity and Determination”

• This 1862 New York Times opinion piece argues that the American South has developed an unnatural aristocracy founded on forcible subjugation.
• This resource relates to the themes of Pride Before the Fall, Women’s Sexuality and Sexual Transgression, and Identity, Legacy, and Destiny.
• What does this writer contend about the aristocratic families of the 19th-century American South? How does it relate to the argument that Faulkner is making in his novel, and how might Jason’s beliefs and behaviors support this?

PART 4

Reading Check

1. What does Mrs. Compson repeatedly call for Dilsey to fetch for her?

2. What has been broken in Jason’s room overnight?

3. What is stolen from Jason’s closet?

4. What object does Luster give Benjy to try to soothe him?

5. After his first effort fails, where does Luster take Benjy to try to calm him down?

Short Answer

Answer each question in at least 1 complete sentence. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.

1. How does an arbitrary demand from Jason lead to a big surprise for the family?

2. What causes Mrs. Compson to beg the others to search for a note?

3. In what sense are the Compson house and the Black church opposites?

4. What motivates the police to refuse to help Jason?

5. What prediction does Dilsey make that comes true in a figurative sense?

Recommended Next Reads 

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

• Another of Faulkner’s novels set in Yoknapatawpha, Absalom, Absalom! tells the story of the rise and fall of a man called Thomas Sutpen. One of the novel’s many narrators is Quentin Compson, which allows the reader to gain additional insight into The Sound and the Fury.
• Shared themes include Pride Before the Fall, Women’s Sexuality and Sexual Transgression, and Identity, Legacy, and Destiny.  
• Shared topics include multiperspectivity, stream-of-consciousness, unreliable narration, allegory of Southern history, Yoknapatawpha, the Compson family, prejudice and discrimination, the decline of Southern aristocracy, symbolic incest, and the intrusion of the past on the present.      
• Absalom, Absalom! on SuperSummary

Beloved by Toni Morrison

• This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is constructed around the protagonist’s murdered daughter, who turns up later as a ghost and forces the protagonist, Sethe, to face the ramifications of her past life as an enslaved person.
• Shared themes include Women’s Sexuality and Sexual Transgression and Identity, Legacy, and Destiny.
• Shared topics include multiperspectivity, stream-of-consciousness, time-shifting, prejudice and discrimination, America at the end of the 19th century, the impact of motherhood, absent figures, family relationships, and the intrusion of the past on the present.
• Beloved on SuperSummary