It opens inside the mind of the "idiot", Benjy, a 33-year-old man who has the mind of a small child. Notoriously, intransigently difficult, the novel takes its title from Macbeth's reflection that life is "a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing". It's a real son-of-a-bitch … This one's the greatest I'll ever write." It took a while to catch on, but for the last half-century readers have agreed with Faulkner: for many, The Sound and the Fury is his greatest novel, and for almost everyone, it's a real son-of-a-bitch. When he finished the novel, Faulkner took it to his friend and acting agent, Ben Wasson, and said to him: "Read this, Bud. Perhaps Faulkner was thinking of his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury when he said this, as it is a book that takes the reader through the same story four times, from the perspective of four different characters – at which point readers just might, with luck and perseverance, have managed to piece together the narrative. "Between Scotch and nothing, I'll take Scotch." And what would he say to people who complained that they couldn't understand his writing, even after they had read it two or three times? "Read it four times," he suggested. "No, I ain't that particular," Faulkner said. "Bourbon, you mean?" asked the interviewer. A writer must learn the tools of his trade Faulkner's were "paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey". ![]() "A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination – any two of which, at times any one of which – can supply the lack of the others," he declared. W hen William Faulkner was asked by the Paris Review to share his thoughts on the art of fiction in 1956, he offered several useful pieces of advice to the aspiring author.
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