Getting Through Chapter 1, The Sound and the Fury

You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith. - William Faulkner

And with faith that the reader would prevail, Faulkner followed in Joyce's footsteps with  76 pages of the stream-of-consciousness thinking of a 33 year old cognitively impaired man named Benji Compson. Benji's thoughts move freely from the present to a variety of scenes in the distant past. The reader is left to guess the time frame as well as the narrative context. Faulkner provided a single clue to decoding the text: he italicized the first line of each time shift. What a difficult book this is!

I made it through As I Lay Dying, but for this book, I had to track down (on Wikipedia) the key that would unlock the time frame. There is a trick. Benji had 3 care takers: one who was with him when he was a child, a second who cared for him as a teen and the third, his current care taker. Note which care taker is telling him to "quiet down" and you know how old he is at that time. That is a huge help, but the context is still tricky, and unless you read the Compson story in the Appendix, you probably have to read the chapter twice. There is one last difficulty. Some of the characters have the same first name and so you need to know that there are 2 Jasons (father and son - easy) and 2 Quentons (one a boy, the other a girl - yikes!).

Twenty years after writing The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner felt bad about the demands he had placed on the reader and wrote a history for the Compson family to be included in the book. (Did his friends, family and other readers send him ranting letters?) He suggested that the new material be placed at the front of the book. The publishers instead made it into an appendix - presumably because it contains spoilers.

Having conquered chapter 1, I am now resting before attempting the next stage of the book and hoping that the worst is behind me.