Absence In Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury

William Faulkner’s novel, The Sound and the Fury, represents an experiment in writing, as was said by the writer himself. It depicts the tragedy of the Compson family, and in the broader view, the fall of the Old South, in a very unusual way. The novel is an experiment in regards to the very specific use of the narrative technique, and the results obtained from it. The whole book echoes various forms of absence which account for the ever-present chaos, and disorder that render the book so hard to understand. Absence in some cases stands for the state of being away, or in other cases the non-existence or the lack of something. The question of absence is central in the novel, and could also be defined as disintegration, because one of the main organizing principles is the paradox. The main accent is on the notions of thematic and formal absence. At the very beginning, the reader is drawn into the story in medias res, surrounded by signifiers deprived of their signified. The absence of author’s intrusion makes the absence of apparent meaning even more complicated for the reader, who has to try to

All the narratives revolve around her, but she herself is not actually present in the novel at all. She is the embodiment of absence, in the sense that her absence creates a void in everyone’s life, which they are all trying to fill in different ways. All the absence present in the novel stems from Caddy’s absence from everyone’s lives. She is present everywhere in the narratives, but the reader doesn’t get her narrative. She leaves a vacant space as far as voices and telling are concerned. Her absence disrupts the order in character’s lives, who keep wandering through life looking for meaning they were deprived of by Caddy’s departure. It is in the same way that the reader struggles to make sense of the novel, and find the intended meaning, but it is all in vain – “theres a curse on us its not our fault is it our