The Sound and the Fury

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. What are the most pertinent facts for a reader to know about American author William Faulkner and his work? If you are unsure, what general ideas do you have about this author?

Teaching Suggestion: You might use this question to ascertain how much students already know about Faulkner. The resources listed below may help to fill in any gaps in their knowledge, while students could revise their initial answers based on what they have learn from them or similar resources. To extend this conversation, consider asking students to compare which Faulkner facts they found most important and share their reasoning for their choices.

• This 4-minute video from Biography offers a brief overview of Faulkner’s life.
• This article explores Faulkner’s reputation and literary legacy.
• This speech, which Faulkner gave upon his acceptance of the 1949 Nobel Prize, outlines his motivations as a writer.

2. What is literary Modernism? How many Modernist techniques can you label and define?

Teaching Suggestion: If your students know relatively little about Modernist techniques, they may find The Sound and the Fury unapproachable and frustrating. The first resource listed below can be used as an overview of the movement; you might also want to give students additional time to look up some of the terminology this resource uses. Potentially the most difficult Modernist aspect of The Sound and the Fury is its use of stream-of-consciousness; the second listed resource delves into this technique. Finally, the third of the listed resources offers some insight into why Faulkner is worth reading despite—and perhaps because of—the challenges created by his Modernist techniques.

• This factsheet from the Norton Anthology highlights key ideas about the culture, society, and literature of literary Modernism.
• This 4-minute video from Oregon State University explains stream-of-consciousness.
• This 5-minute video from TED-Ed offers advice about how to understand Modernist techniques typical of Faulkner’s works, including some helpful observations specific to The Sound and the Fury.

Short Activity

The novel you are about to read offers several siblings’ perspectives on their shared past. In this activity, you will experiment with this narrative technique by writing a piece in which two characters sequentially share differing perspectives on the same events.

• Imagine a brief sequence of action involving at least two characters.
• Think about how the passage of time, individual motivations, human psychology, and related factors might cause two of the characters involved to wind up with very different perspectives about what happened.
• Write a first-person narrative paragraph from one character’s perspective. Try to convey this character’s personality and psychology as they relate their version of the events.
• Write a second paragraph from another character’s perspective, discussing the same series of events. Try to use differences in details, emphasis, and interpretation to convey how this second character’s personality and psychology differ from the first character’s.

Teaching Suggestion: Students will be better prepared to extract meaning from Faulkner’s novel after constructing their own examples of how multiple narrative perspectives can be used to comment on human psychology. You might use this activity to introduce the term “multiperspectivity” to facilitate their discussion of this technique as they read Faulkner’s work. The resources listed below are not necessary to completing the activity; they are offered as support should you wish to explore multiperspectivity with your students in more depth.

• This article from author Edward Cahill explains how and why to use multiperspectivity.
• This entry from the University of Hamburg’s The Living Handbook of Narratology offers an in-depth academic examination of multiperspectivity.

Differentiation Suggestion: Literal thinkers and students with less developed theory of mind may struggle to imagine how a single set of events can give rise to differing interpretations and memories. They may need to be given a concrete example and then led through a more abstract example on a relatable topic. For example, you could show how a physical object might be understood differently by viewers in different positions, then you could discuss how a teacher might think a student is lazy for not turning in their work versus the student’s perspective that the teacher is too strict.

Personal Connection Prompt

This prompt can be used for in-class discussion, exploratory free-writing, or reflection homework before reading the text.

When two people you know have a conflict with each other and separately complain to you about what happened, what do you notice about the details they each remember and emphasize? What do you notice about their assumptions and beliefs? Why might it be easier to notice these things in other people’s stories than in our own?

Teaching Suggestion: This prompt asks students to connect Faulkner’s narrative technique with their own experiences and insights into human nature, laying a foundation for later consideration of what this technique is meant to convey about the reliability of human memory, judgment, and language. After students finish writing or discussing, you might extend this conversation by asking students what is both irritating and interesting about these situations and what their insights might predict about the experience of reading Faulkner’s novel.