The Sound and the Fury:Interpreting Caddy Compson

William Faulkner's fourth novel, The Sound and the Fury, is a haunting and sometimes bewildering novel that surprises and absorbs the reader each time it is read. The novel was Faulkner's personal favorite and, along with James Joyce's novel Ulysses and T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land, is generally thought to be one of the greatest works of literature in English of the twentieth century. The Sound and the Fury also signalled the beginning …

…courage, adventurousness, and a willingness to defy authority. Her male onlookers, meanwhile, could merely stand below and watch the muddy seat of her drawers. Is it a coincidence then that, in this novel, Caddy remains imprisoned within the narratives of three brothers whose obsessions and preoccupations reveal that, in a sense, they are all still fixated on those muddy drawers? Certainly, Caddy's unchosen silence signifies more than the desire to make her seem "more passionate."