“Trying to Say”: Memory, Overheard Mothers, and the Rhetoric of Modernity in Faulkner’s \u3cem\u3eThe Sound and the Fury\u3c/em\u3e

William Faulkner is hailed as a major figure of American modernist writing, and The Sound and the Fury is considered his most experimental work. Through a careful reading of the maternal figures in a novel narrated entirely by male voices, I explore Faulkner’s attempt to locate the emerging “structure of feeling” of the modern era. His struggle to comprehend characters removed from his own gender and racial position necessitates the creation of a rhetorical method that departs from tradition