福克纳 |The Sound and the Fury 喧哗与骚动

The Sound and the Fury is set in Mississippi in the early 1900s, and primarily follows the decline of the Compsons, a white aristocratic family. When the South was defeated in the Civil War in the 1860s, slavery was abolished and many of the wealthy families lost their source of income. Reconstruction, a period following the war and intended to both return the South to prosperity and establish rights for freed slaves, was mostly a failure. As a result families like the Compsons lost their wealth and status while still clinging to their old, aristocratic traditions and values, even in the face of the changing modern world. At the same time black families like the Gibsons were still second-class citizens, hardly better off than they were as slaves, and subject to Jim Crow laws, indentured servitude, and the danger of being lynched by the Klu Klux Klan.