SOURCE: Toker, Leona. “Diffusion of Information in The Sound and the Fury.” College Literature 15, no. 2 (spring 1988): 111-35.

In the following essay, Toker explores the effects on the reader of the difficult narrative patterns in The Sound and the Fury.

A time to get, and a time to lose; a time           to keep and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time           to keep silence, and a time to speak. 

—Ecclesiastes, 3:6,7

The text of The Sound and the Fury is at first difficult to follow. The diffusive presentation of material impedes the imaginative construction of the scenes: words tend to fall flat on our inner ear, failing to come alive in a dramatic illusion. And since the initial mist is at its densest in Section 1 (“told by an idiot”), it seems to be a side effect of Faulkner's experiment with the...