The Sound and the Fury
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free The Sound and the Fury trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury tells the fall of the Compsons, an old Mississippi family, through voices that rarely explain themselves. Time slips without warning, the same events return from different angles, and the reader has to piece the story together. That difficulty is exactly why the novel is so often taught, argued over and reread. This quiz follows the book the way a careful reader does. It asks who the Compson children are and what each of them wants, what happens on the novel's handful of days, and how the people who work for the family see it all. Other questions cover how Faulkner built the book, where it came from, what he added to it years later, and how it fared on screen. It is written for students checking their reading, for teachers who want ready-made multiple-choice questions, and for book clubs working through Faulkner together. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you can play straight through or print the set.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The title of The Sound and the Fury comes from a bleak speech about life in which Shakespeare tragedy?
Macbeth
Macbeth supplies the title: told that his wife is dead, the king compares life to a fool's noisy story that means nothing. Faulkner then opens the novel inside the mind of Benjy, who cannot make sense of events.
Q 02Benjy Compson narrates the opening section of The Sound and the Fury although he is unable to do what?
Speak
Speak is the one thing he cannot do, yet his section relays other people's talk in full, even when he does not understand it. He bellows or moans, and those around him must guess why.
Q 03The pasture sold to pay for Quentin Compson's schooling in The Sound and the Fury becomes what?
A golf course
A golf course replaces the pasture that had been Benjy's share of the family land. The players' shouts for a caddie remind him of his absent sister, and he moans at the fence.
Q 04William Faulkner said The Sound and the Fury grew from the image of a little girl doing what?
Climbing a tree
Climbing a tree to peek at a funeral, the girl shows her muddy underwear to the brothers looking up from below. Faulkner built Caddy Compson, and then the whole novel, around that picture.
Q 05On the last day of his life in The Sound and the Fury, what does Quentin Compson deliberately break?
His watch
His watch is one way Quentin tries to stop knowing the time, along with keeping away from his own shadow. Clock bells go on reminding him of the hour anyway.
Q 06Most of The Sound and the Fury unfolds over a single weekend in 1928 that marks which holiday?
Easter
Easter weekend frames three of the four sections, one each on Good Friday, Holy Saturday and the Sunday. Benjy turns 33 on the Saturday.
Q 07Caddy Compson is at the heart of The Sound and the Fury, yet what is unusual about her role?
She never narrates
She never narrates, so readers see Caddy only through other people's eyes. The four sections follow her childhood, her adolescence, her adulthood and finally her absence from the family.
Q 08Which fictional Mississippi county, the setting of most Faulkner novels, is home to The Sound and the Fury?
Yoknapatawpha
Yoknapatawpha is the county Faulkner called his own apocryphal one, and he drew a map of it for a later novel. It stands in for Lafayette County, where he spent most of his life.
Q 09Which actor directed the 2014 film of The Sound and the Fury and cast himself as Benjy Compson?
James Franco
James Franco directed and played Benjy, and gave cameos to Seth Rogen and Danny McBride. The film had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.
Q 10The Sound and the Fury helped William Faulkner win which honor for 1949, awarded for his novels?
The Nobel Prize
The Nobel Prize for 1949 was held over for a year, so Faulkner collected it in Stockholm in December 1950, at the same banquet as the 1950 winner Bertrand Russell.
Q 11The Compsons' hometown in The Sound and the Fury is modeled on which real Mississippi town where Faulkner lived?
Oxford
Oxford, the seat of Lafayette County, is the model for the Compsons' town. Faulkner's family moved there when he was a small boy, and it stayed his home for most of his life.
Q 12The Compsons sell family land in The Sound and the Fury to send Quentin to which university?
Harvard
Harvard is where Quentin spends his final day, weighed down by guilt over the land that paid for it. Faulkner drew those Northern scenes from a visit to a friend in New Haven, Connecticut.
Q 13In The Sound and the Fury, Caddy Compson names her daughter Quentin in memory of whom?
Her dead brother
Q 21Which novel about the Bundren family's burial journey did Faulkner publish the year after The Sound and the Fury?
As I Lay Dying
As I Lay Dying appeared in 1930, told by fifteen narrators across 59 chapters. It goes back to the same invented county, this time among poor farmers rather than a fallen old family.
Q 22What does Miss Quentin steal from her uncle Jason on the night she flees in The Sound and the Fury?
His hidden money
His hidden money is gone from its box by morning, and much of it was hers by right: her mother had been sending it for years. Jason gives chase but never catches her.
Q 23Which fictional town, the seat of Faulkner's invented county, is home to the Compsons in The Sound and the Fury?
Jefferson
Her dead brother had drowned himself, and the girl, known as Miss Quentin, carries his name. She grows up in the Compson house under the thumb of her uncle Jason.
Q 14How is the final section of The Sound and the Fury told, unlike the three sections before it?
In the third person
In the third person, an outside narrator follows Dilsey, Jason and Benjy through the Sunday. Only here does the novel describe what its characters look like.
Q 15The Sound and the Fury is a landmark of which modernist technique, also used by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf?
Stream of consciousness
Stream of consciousness shapes the first three sections, each an inner monologue that covers a single day. The plot arrives out of order, but within each day events run in sequence.
Q 16Which actor played Jason Compson in the 1959 film of The Sound and the Fury?
Yul Brynner
Yul Brynner played a Jason rewritten as a step-uncle, in a film built around his clashes with Miss Quentin. Gregory Peck had earlier signed to star.
Q 17Jason Compson loses heavily in The Sound and the Fury by speculating on the price of which crop?
Cotton
Cotton futures are Jason's gamble, and he funds it with what his sister sends for her daughter. He neglects both his job and those investments to chase his niece around town.
Q 18What does each of the four sections of The Sound and the Fury carry as its only heading?
A date
A date heads each section, and they run out of order: the second jumps back eighteen years to 1910. A stage version of a single section even took its day as a subtitle.
Q 19In Benjy's section of The Sound and the Fury, what does the text usually switch into when time shifts?
Italics
Italics usually signal that Benjy's mind has slipped to another time, though not always. An editor once stripped them out, and Faulkner wrote to demand that they be restored.
Q 20Quentin Compson of The Sound and the Fury returns to tell which 1936 Faulkner novel about planter Thomas Sutpen?
Absalom, Absalom!
Absalom, Absalom! has Quentin piece together the Sutpen story with his college roommate. Guinness once listed a 1,288-word sentence from it as the longest in literature.
Jefferson is the county seat in most of Faulkner's fiction, and the old Compson and Sartoris plantations lay close beside it. The town turns up in story after story.
Q 24Quentin Compson of The Sound and the Fury drowns himself in which river, where a bridge plaque now remembers him?
The Charles
The Charles is where Quentin ends his life in June 1910. A brass plaque the size of a single brick, set low on the Anderson Memorial Bridge, honors the fictional student.
Q 25What was Benjy Compson's name in The Sound and the Fury before his mother changed it when he was five?
Maury
Maury was the name of his mother's brother, and she took it back once the boy's disability was plain. From then on he was Benjamin.
Q 26With whom does Miss Quentin run away from the Compson house at the end of The Sound and the Fury?
A carnival worker
A carnival worker from the show visiting town is her way out. Jason trails the troupe to the next town, picks a fight with one of the hands and gets hurt without ever finding her.
Q 27What is Luster hunting for through much of Benjy's section of The Sound and the Fury?
A quarter
A quarter is the price of that night's show, and Luster has lost his. In the end it is Miss Quentin who gives him one.
Q 28Before borrowing from Shakespeare, William Faulkner gave The Sound and the Fury which one-word working title?
Twilight
Twilight was the working title of a story Faulkner first planned as a short piece about children sent away from a funeral. He wrote it without expecting it to sell.
Q 29In The Sound and the Fury, what does Caddy's husband Herbert Head promise her brother Jason, who never gets it?
A job in a bank
A job in a bank vanishes when Head learns his bride was pregnant before they met and divorces her. Eighteen years on, Jason is still bitter and takes it out on her daughter.
Q 30What is done to Benjy Compson in The Sound and the Fury after he chases a schoolgirl he takes for Caddy?
He is castrated
He is castrated after running at the girl, whom he believes to be his long-gone sister. Faulkner borrowed wording from Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises to describe the operation.