The Sound and the Fury was the novel that marked the beginning of Faulkner's greatest sequence of fiction and established the dar side of the southlands as his undisputed literary territory. It chronicles the disintegration of the once-genteel southern family in the words of three brothers and their black servant. Quentin is doomed by incestuous passion, while Jason is ridden by pettiness and greed and the tragic Benjy is an idiot child of thirty-three. Only the decency of the maidservant Dilsey offers counterpoint to their corroded humility.