Upon publication the influential critic Clifton Fadiman dismissed the novel, arguing in The Nation that "the theme and the characters are trivial, unworthy of the enormous and complex craftsmanship expended on them."[7] But The Sound and the Fury ultimately went on to achieve a prominent place among the greatest of American novels, playing a role in William Faulkner's receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.
It is nearly unanimously considered a masterpiece by literary critics and scholars, but its unconventional narrative style frequently alienates new readers. Although the vocabulary is generally basic, the stream-of-consciousness technique, which attempts to transcribe the thoughts of the narrators directly, with frequent switches in time and setting and with loose sentence structure and grammar, has made it a quintessentially difficult modernist work.
