In the following essay, Toker explores the effects on the reader of the difficult narrative patterns in The Sound and the Fury.

Faulkner has not only remained guilty of occasional carelessness, especially in sentence construction, but seems to have persisted in mannerisms. On the other hand, his progress as a stylist has been steady and rapid; his third novel, Sartoris, while still experimenting toward a technique, was a notable advance over his first two in style as well as in theme and narrative structure, and in his fourth novel, The Sound and the Fury, style is what it has continued to be in all his subsequent work, a significan...

Although Faulkner never thought of his work as political in the usual sense … early in his career he commenced a determined struggle against dehumanization in his social milieu (soulless technology and commercialism, the alienation of human powers and identity) and, more importantly, in the literary milieu itself. By the time he wrote The Sound and the Fury he had experimented with versions of at least three of those dominant aesthetic modes of his time which were, according to [George] Lukács...