Part Three of The Sound and the Fury is narrated by a man who is unmistakably evil, and Part Four helps clarify the novel through its use of a more objective third-person narrator. Additionally, The Sound and the Fury provides a clearer distinction between unreliable and reliable narrators. However, As I Lay Dying presents us with a far greater range of voices. In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner made use of some elements of this technique. Faulkner's innovation is in how we see this unified set of events: we are forced to look at the story from a number of different perspectives, each of which is highly subjective.
The narrative appears fragmentary, but the story demonstrates admirable unity: it is limited to the span of a few days, and the different sub-plots are logically and skillfully interwoven. The novel is a series of interior monologues, and through these fragmented passages we piece together the story of Addie Bundren's death and the transport of her body to Jefferson. Each section falls somewhere in the range from confessional to stream-of-consciousness. The language is intense and highly subjective, with a recognizable change in language depending on the narrator. Fifteen narrators alternate, delivering interior monologues with varying degrees of coherence and emotional intensity. The structure of As I Lay Dying is powerful and innovative. He ends up being put into an asylum, with his older brother Cash musing on the definition of "insane." Evaluating "truth" becomes an equally tricky enterprise, with Faulkner depicting a truth as mutable and violent as the river the Bundrens cross midway through the novel. Darl, who emerges early as the novel's most important narrator, is eloquent but considered strange by his family and neighbors. Objective reality does not exist in As I Lay Dying we have only the highly subjective interior monologues of fifteen different narrators.
Faulkner used stream-of-consciousness narrative to explore perception and thought as the basis of experience.
In both of these novels, Faulkner built on a tradition begun by modernist authors like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The Sound and the Fury is widely considered to be among the greatest of the modernist novels, and is hailed as a masterpiece of 20th century literature. As I Lay Dying was published in 1930, immediately following the work that many consider to be Faulkner's masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury.
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