The Sound and the Fury

The fall of the Compsons, an old Mississippi family, told four times over across three days in 1928 and one in 1910. Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County is drawn from the real Lafayette County, and its town of Jefferson from Oxford, where he lived and is buried. The map grounds the invented county in that ground: the courthouse square, the Compson place, the pasture sold off to a golf course, the branch below it. Quentin's day belongs elsewhere, at Harvard and on the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, mapped as scenes outside the setting.

Benjy Compson

Jefferson (Oxford), Mississippi: the courthouse square

April 7, 1928

The town at the heart of the county is a square built around a courthouse, with a Confederate monument on the corner and shops along each side. The book ends here, with Benjy driven around the square in a buggy and howling when the horse turns the wrong way past the monument, needing every familiar thing in its place. Faulkner built Jefferson out of the Oxford he walked every day.

Benjy's section (April 7, 1928)

inspired by Jefferson is Faulkner's fictional county seat, but it is modelled closely on Oxford, and its square on the real one around the Lafayette County Courthouse; sited at that courthouse. The novel's closing ride circles the monument and the storefronts of the square.

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Benjy Compson

The Compson place

April 7, 1928

A big house going quietly to ruin on the town's edge, home to a family that has sold off its land and its dignity piece by piece. Benjy, who cannot speak, moves through its rooms and yard by smell and habit, and the reader learns the family's decline through what he half-understands. Faulkner drew the place from the old Oxford homes near his own, Rowan Oak.

Benjy's section (April 7, 1928)

inspired by The Compson house is invented, an antebellum family seat on the edge of Jefferson. It is sited here on the wooded grounds of Rowan Oak, Faulkner's own home south-west of the Oxford square, the kind of old Oxford property he drew the Compson place from.

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Benjy Compson

The pasture, sold to the golf club

April 7, 1928

The family's last good land, a pasture beside the house, is sold off to a golf club to pay for the eldest son's year at Harvard. Benjy watches the golfers from the fence and moans whenever one of them calls for his caddie, a word that sounds to him like the name of the sister he has lost. It is his ruined world in a single scene.

Benjy's section (April 7, 1928)

inspired by The Compsons sell the pasture that adjoins their house to become a golf links, using the money to send Quentin to Harvard. The fictional field is sited here at the Ole Miss Golf Course north of the Oxford campus, the real golf ground of Faulkner's town that stands in for it.

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