The Sound and the Fury: William Faulkner’s Rashomon, written by four or five Alternate Personalities

In the same Paris Review interview discussed in yesterday’s post, Faulkner tells how The Sound and the Fury was written.

The novel’s first narrator was “the idiot child.” The second narrator was “another brother.” The third narrator was “the third brother.” The fourth narrator was the interviewee, “making myself the spokesman.” The latter says he made a fifth attempt to tell the story fifteen years later in an appendix to another book. “I couldn’t leave it alone, and I never could tell it right, though I tried hard and would like to try again, though I’d probably fail again.”

According to Faulkner, telling the story from those four or five points of view was not an innovative technique. It represented his five attempts to tell the story right, which, according to Faulkner, never succeeded.

Objectively, Faulkner did make five attempts to tell the story. But that is not what happened in Faulkner’s subjective experience of it. Because each narrator noted above was an autonomous alternate personality with, in Faulkner’s subjective experience, a mind of its own.

On the page just before he tells how he wrote The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner says the kind of thing that so many novelists acknowledge: “Because with me there is always a point in the book where the characters themselves rise up and take charge and finish the job…”

That is how novels are written. Novelists keep saying so. But nobody believes them.

So The Sound and the Fury was actually written in the way I speculated in previous posts that the Japanese tale—made into the movie Rashomon—was written.

I suspect that a lot of what has been thought of as modern and postmodern literary innovations could be better explained by Multiple Identity Literary Theory.