Blog #6 The Sound and the Fuzzy!

Though The Sound and the Furry has been very difficult to follow, I have actually enjoyed trying to figure out what the heck is going on. I mean, the whole concept of no time, and everything kind-of happening at once is really cool. It reminds me a little of Slaughterhouse Five. When I first read Faulkner's introduction I had no idea of what he meant by "I wrote this book and learned to read," but now I am gradually beginning to see where he is coming from. The fact that time doesn't have much of a purpose, and that the reader has to focuse on the relationships, the setting, the characters, is all pretty cool and interesting. What is interesting to me is that this story could easily be told in the traditional way by many authors; a story about a disfunctional family in the south. And although I keep finding myself quite frustrated with trying to figure out the story line, when we discuss it in class I feel like we, as a class, are getting much more out of this book than any other book we have read, purely because of the way which we have to look at it. Rather than look at the order in which things happened, the particular way in what happened, we are just looking at what is.

This book has also made me think about time in a different way as well, I mean for time to be insequential is very weird, and I still don't quite understand that part of the book either. I mean, I realize that Benjy is mentally ill, but I still don't see how everything is all kind-of occurring at the same time. To think that something that happened 10 years ago could seem like it's happening now is quite odd, so I'm still trying to grasp that aspect of the book.

One other thing I found intereting about The Sound and the Furry is how by Benjy's senses he kind of jumps from one point of time to another. This is cool to me because it's something that happens to me all the time, and I know it happens for a lot of other people too. For example, there are certain songs, certain smells, certain images, and feelings, and whenever I experience these certain things, I can often related it to the past, or it just often reminds me of something that has happened in the past. So to me it is really interesting how our minds work that way, which is kind-of what our little "timed" writing exercise at the end of Thursday's class showed us.

Overall although I'm enjoying figuring out some of the deeper meanings and what is really going on, the book as a whole is still a little fuzzy to me, and I'm curious to see how the rest of it will play out!!