Faulkner's the Sound and the Fury: The Incest Theme

On the final pages of Flags in the Dust, Faulkner expressed dissatisfaction with both the traditional narrative used to pattern the novel and the consequences such a rigid structure had for his characters' evolution: “And if they were just glamorous enough, there would be a Sartoris in them, and then they were sure to be disastrous. Pawns. But the Player and the game He plays—who knows? He must have a name for his pawns, though, but perhaps Sartoris is the name of the game itself—a game outmoded and played with pawns shaped too late and to an old dead pattern, and of which the Player Himself is a little wearied.”1 Here Faulkner, concluding the preliminary phase of his career, openly acknowledged a distrust of his authorial relationship to his characters. Identifying himself as the omniscient narrator, he compared his relation to characters with a chess strategist's authority over his chessmen, all of which are sacrificial pawns: due to the nature of the game, all chessmen, whether in the front or back lines, are reduced to mere instrumentalities in the design of players. As described above, at the end of Flags in the Dust, Faulkner publicly rejected the reduction of character to instrumentality while he criticized his own use of the “old dead [narrative] pattern” as an “outmoded” means of creating fiction. And he continued this repudiation of authoritative privilege by writing The Sound and the Fury which, in developing the Compson brothers thoroughly, emphasized their individuality.

Faulkner realized that to create three differentiated personalities with their own dynamics, he needed to abandon the role of omniscient narrator, and with it, the degree of omnipotent control he wielded when spelling out his interpretation