Ah, home sweet home. A falling-apart house in a small Mississippi town becomes the center of this novel. As we see, however, even the land the house stands on is disintegrating: pasture land is sold to buy a college education. More than the Compson house, however, this is also a novel about the South. Heck, maybe it’s even THE novel about the South. Rife with the smells, sounds, and sights of rural Mississippi, The Sound and the Fury creates a world that hovers between the history of the Civil War and the present (that’s the 1930s, in case you were wondering).
Questions About Home
- How does the emphasis on the difference between the Gibson house and the Compson house affect your ideas of the Compson family?
- Is Caddy a good sister?
- How does selling Benjy’s land affect the Compson family? Who does it affect most?
- Who is the head of the Compson family?
Chew on This
It’s impossible to imagine the Compson house. Faulkner presents the reader with too many fragmented smells, sounds, and colors to allow us to draw together a single image.
"Home" in The Sound and the Fury exists only in characters’ memory. Home never "is" – it’s always a location in the past.