William Faulkner: Novels, Narrators and Exam Traps

“It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” Macbeth says it in Act 5 when he hears that his wife is dead, and William Faulkner took two words of it for the title of his most famous novel. The site’s Shakespeare question set asks where the title of The Sound and the Fury comes from, and it asks it twice. Examiners like Faulkner questions that can be answered from a title, a narrator or a date, because the novels themselves are hard to read and harder to summarise.

The line also tells you how the novel works. Its first section is narrated by Benjy Compson, a man with an intellectual disability who cannot keep past and present apart. A tale told by an idiot, literally. Once you see that, the rest of Faulkner opens up: he is a novelist of voices, and most exam questions on him are really questions about who is speaking.

Asked in: UGC NET, State SET, GATE, KVS and State PGT/TGT, UP PGT, Assistant Professor exams.

Why Faulkner keeps turning up in papers

Faulkner is the American modernist in most syllabi. Where British papers test Joyce and Woolf for stream of consciousness, American papers test Faulkner, and he is the name examiners reach for when they need a Southern novelist in a list. That gives three common question shapes.

The first is the attribution set: a list of five titles, of which three are Faulkner’s and two are planted from Zora Neale Hurston, Kahlil Gibran or someone else. The second is the match-the-author item, where Faulkner sits beside Hemingway, Melville and Twain. The third is the title-source or narrator question: where does the title come from, who narrates this section, which sentence is a whole chapter.

My advice: do not try to read all nineteen novels. Read the first section of The Sound and the Fury and about half of As I Lay Dying so you know how his voices feel, then learn the tables below. That covers almost every Faulkner question the site has recorded.

The novels with their dates

Dates are of first publication. The bold rows carry most of the marks; the rest are recognition knowledge for attribution questions.

Short stories that get named: “A Rose for Emily” (1930), “Dry September” (1931), “That Evening Sun” (1931) and “Barn Burning” (1939). His Collected Stories won the National Book Award in 1951.

The four novels that matter, one at a time

The Sound and the Fury (1929)

The decline of the Compsons, an old Jefferson family. The novel has four sections, each fixed to a date. Benjy narrates the first (7 April 1928), Quentin the second (2 June 1910, the day he drowns himself while a student at Harvard), Jason the third (6 April 1928), and the fourth (8 April 1928, Easter Sunday) is told in the third person and follows Dilsey, the family’s Black servant. At the centre is the sister, Caddy, who never gets a section of her own. Her daughter, also called Quentin, runs away at the end with the money Jason has hoarded.

The detail exams like: the dates are out of order. The 1910 section sits between two 1928 sections. In 1945 Faulkner also wrote an appendix on the Compson family for Malcolm Cowley’s The Portable Faulkner (1946).

As I Lay Dying (1930)

Addie Bundren dies, and her husband Anse and their children carry her body by wagon to be buried in Jefferson, as she asked. They cross a flooded river, lose the mules, and survive a barn fire. The book has 59 short sections narrated by 15 characters, each section titled with the narrator’s name. Darl narrates the most (19). Addie herself gets one section after her death.

The children: Cash (the carpenter who builds the coffin), Darl (who sets the barn on fire and is sent to the asylum in Jackson), Jewel (Addie’s son by the preacher Whitfield), Dewey Dell (pregnant, looking for an abortion) and Vardaman (the youngest). Vardaman’s section reads, in full, “My mother is a fish.” That sentence is a site question. The title comes from Homer’s Odyssey, where Agamemnon’s ghost describes his death. Faulkner said he wrote the novel in six weeks, working nights.

Light in August (1932)

Two stories that touch only at the edges. Lena Grove, pregnant, walks from Alabama to Mississippi looking for Lucas Burch, the father, who now calls himself Joe Brown. Joe Christmas, an orphan who does not know whether he has Black ancestry, kills Joanna Burden, the woman he has been living with, and is hunted down and killed by Percy Grimm. Byron Bunch falls in love with Lena; Gail Hightower is the disgraced minister who helps deliver her baby.

Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

Thomas Sutpen arrives in Yoknapatawpha in 1833, builds a plantation called Sutpen’s Hundred, and tries to found a dynasty. His son Henry kills Charles Bon, his half-brother and his sister Judith’s fiancé. The story is pieced together by Rosa Coldfield, Mr Compson and above all Quentin Compson and his Canadian roommate Shreve McCannon, talking in their room at Harvard. The title comes from David’s lament for his son in the Bible (2 Samuel 18:33). Faulkner’s hand-drawn map of the county was printed with this novel.

Form notes: how Faulkner tells a story

A statement question on Faulkner’s technique usually tests one of these five points.

1. Stream of consciousness. Benjy’s and Quentin’s sections in The Sound and the Fury are the standard examples in American fiction. Benjy’s section moves between years with only a change to italics as a signal.
2. Multiple narrators. As I Lay Dying has 15; The Sound and the Fury has three first-person narrators and a third-person close.
3. Broken chronology. Events are given out of order and the reader assembles them, most fully in Absalom, Absalom!.
4. Long sentences. The opposite of Hemingway’s. Some sentences in Absalom, Absalom! run for pages.
5. “We” as narrator. “A Rose for Emily” is told by the townspeople in the first person plural, which is why it appears in narration questions.

Which novel? Characters to match

Quentin Compson is the one to watch. He narrates a section of The Sound and the Fury and is the main teller in Absalom, Absalom!, so an option that pairs him with either novel can be correct.

Where Faulkner belongs: groups and movements

Group-membership questions are short, and the wrong options are usually real writers from the right decade.

• Modernism. Faulkner is the American novelist set beside Joyce and Woolf for stream of consciousness. If you have the site’s James Joyce questions and Virginia Woolf questions done, you already know the technique he is tested on.
• The Southern Renaissance. The name for the burst of Southern American writing between the wars. Faulkner is its central figure.
• Southern Gothic. Decay, violence and grotesque secrets in a Southern setting. “A Rose for Emily” is the classroom example.
• Not a Fugitive or Agrarian. The Fugitive poets and the Agrarians of Vanderbilt (John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren) were Southern contemporaries, but Faulkner was not one of them.
• Hollywood. He worked as a screenwriter and has credits on Howard Hawks’s To Have and Have Not (1944), from Hemingway’s novel, and The Big Sleep (1946), from Raymond Chandler’s.

His reputation was low in the early 1940s, when most of his books were out of print. Malcolm Cowley’s anthology The Portable Faulkner (1946) brought him back, and the Nobel Prize followed three years later.

Asked in exams: Faulkner questions from the site

These are real questions from Limitless Literature’s previous year collections. Where the page does not name the exam and year, the row says “Previous year question”. Open the source to practise the full item.

Five of these test Faulkner directly; the last three use his name as bait. For more American fiction practice, work through the topic-wise previous year question collection and the full previous year question papers archive.

Traps that cost marks

1. The other Falkner. Mary Shelley published a novel called Falkner in 1837. Papers sometimes print it as “Faulkner”. If it sits in a Mary Shelley list, it is hers, and it is not the odd one out. Faulkner’s own family name was spelled Falkner; the “u” appears around 1918.
2. Title sources. The Sound and the Fury: Macbeth, not King Lear or Hamlet. As I Lay Dying: Homer’s Odyssey, not the Bible. Absalom, Absalom!: the Bible (2 Samuel). Go Down, Moses: an African American spiritual.
3. 1949 or 1950? Faulkner’s Nobel Prize is the 1949 prize. It was held over and handed to him in Stockholm in December 1950, together with Bertrand Russell’s 1950 prize. If the options offer both years, choose 1949. Hemingway’s Nobel came later, in 1954.
4. Pulitzer books. His two Pulitzers went to A Fable (1955) and The Reivers (1963), not to The Sound and the Fury or Absalom, Absalom!.
5. Jefferson is not Oxford. Oxford, Mississippi is the real town Faulkner lived in. Jefferson is its fictional version and the county seat of Yoknapatawpha.
6. The Huck Finn line. “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain” is Hemingway’s, from Green Hills of Africa (1935). Faulkner is the planted option.

Where to go next

Faulkner reads best beside the Ernest Hemingway guide, since the two are paired in matching questions and their styles are opposites. The Toni Morrison guide is the natural next step: Morrison wrote her master’s thesis partly on Faulkner, and her novels take up his themes of family memory and race in the South. For American drama of the same decades, see the Arthur Miller guide. Every author guide is listed on the Authors A–Z page, and UP PGT candidates can see Faulkner’s place in their syllabus on the UP PGT English hub.

The site has no Faulkner mind map yet, so the tables above are your revision sheet. For the Nobel citation and his acceptance speech, see the Nobel Prize page for 1949.

Self-test: five questions

FAQ

Which William Faulkner novel should I read first for exams?

Read the first section of The Sound and the Fury (1929) and as much of As I Lay Dying (1930) as you can. Most Faulkner questions are about these two novels, their narrators and their titles.

When did Faulkner win the Nobel Prize?

He won the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. The prize was presented in December 1950, which is why some books give 1950.

What is Yoknapatawpha County?

Faulkner’s imaginary county in northern Mississippi, based on Lafayette County. Its county seat is Jefferson, modelled on Oxford. Most of his novels and stories are set there.

Where does the title The Sound and the Fury come from?

From Macbeth’s speech in Act 5 of Shakespeare’s Macbeth: life is “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.”