The Sound and the Fury

Another week of AP Lit has gone by and this week, we started a new novel,
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. We read the first few pages of the novel (3~20).
My first impression was that Faulkner was a confused person. A novel that even the author didn't
make any sense of and interpreted in different meanings, I didn't know if this would
be a great novel after all. When reading the very first few pages of the book, I was very confused.
I can't say that I'm not anymore. But in the beginning of reading it by myself, I was truly lost.
The random date and scene changes that Benjy introduced were not clear at all. They were certainly
given at very random moments in the book, sometimes so sudden that I didn't even catch that it
was a flashback, but thought it was another scene hard to make any sense out of.
In this blog post, I want to take an especially closer look at the character, Benjy. Benjy is the
character with the mental disability. He is characterized as having no emotions and is more like an
animal than a human. There was a question in class: do you sympathize or pity Benjy?
I personally did not pity Benjy. Although he didn't have the ability to express and feel like the
rest of the human population, he himself was not aware of this and lived perfectly fine with who he was.
This relates back the The Awakening and how I didn't sympathize or feel sorry for the "trapped"
Adele, who lived by societal standards, because she was happy with the person she was, and the
fact that she was not exposed to the freedom Edna had, she was able to live perfectly fine.
Nevertheless, I don't think Benjy was completely emotionless. He had the ability to cry and feel
some kind of sorrow, although he wasn't sure of what it was. He was able to remember Caddie and
was able to feel something grow inside of him when he remembered her.
This novel is really confusing. I don't like the way it is written, Faulkner's style is not working with me.
Especially because I like pieces with exact meanings and an exact ending (Yes, Inception was
a great movie, but the ending still bothers me. I personally would have liked it much more if
it had a definite ending.), The Sound and the Fury will be a piece of literature I will enjoy reading.
There are times when the novel is extremely bland and boring, with a lack of description. Being both
bland and hard to interpret, The Sound and the Fury seems like it will be a hard book to
accomplish and enjoy. But I'm going to try to enjoy this piece of literature because it's going to
help me become more analytical and break apart the meanings of texts that are hard to interpret.