The Sound and the Fury is made up of undifferentiated streams of consciousness that ultimately turn out to be the inner voices of a family's siblings. Its construction is so masterful that the last sentence refers the reader back to the first one, as any perfect work of art might do.

Sound has the earmarks of a modern psychological study, although the book was published in 1929. It is a dramatic and harrowing tale of the Compson family's pathology—primarily in the form of incest and incestuous thoughts.