The Sound and the Fury was the novel that marked the beginning of Faulkner's greatest sequence of fiction and established the dark side of the southands as his undisputed literary territory. It chronicles the disintegration of a 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 thrity-three. Only the decency of the maidservant Dilsey offers counterpoint to theircorroded humanity.