Evidence of Authorial Design in William Faulkner's 'The Sound And The Fury' Daniel James Wood

A sense of 'authorial design' in William Faulkner's 'The Sound And The Fury' does not make itself apparent until the second section of the book, narrated by the suicidal Quentin, although the seeds of this design are planted in the earliest pages of the novel, in the first section narrated by Benjy, in the form of hints at future events to be foreshadowed. However, we are not immediately aware of their presence or their effect until certain elements within Benjy's confused narrative are resurrected, embellished, and built-upon in later sections of the story. It is only with the power of hindsight, looking back on the early parts of the narrative, that we realize this sense of design and intelligent structure was there all along.

The initial evidence of this is only small, and is of no great overall importance with regard to the narrative, but it serves the grander purpose of linking together the events depicted in the first, third, and last sections of the book by not only allowing us to piece them together in a chronological way, but also by allowing us to discover for ourselves the causal chain of events that led to their occurrence in the first place. "Aint you going to help me find that quarter...