The Sound and the Fury is a novel about loss. Its innovative stream of consciousness technique establishes each character’s fundamental state of solitude and their individual experience of loss. The figure of Caddy, although only present in the novel through other characters’ thought processes, is the main pivot on which the characters’ emotions turn. The past is the present for the characters in The Sound and the Fury because they are unable to reconcile the events of the past with their lives in the present. Caddy is, therefore, the absent protagonist of this unusually harrowing novel. Her retarded brother, Benjy, can only wail in confusion as he is locked within a continuum of time whereby the past and the present are indistinguishable. He is therefore plunged into an incomprehensible abyss of perpetual loss that he is unable to articulate. Her brother, Quentin, laments her loss as a virgin which incorporates a dimension of incestuous desire into the novel. Due to the depths of consciousness that the novel exposes to the reader, it is very much open to interpretation. The sentences are deliberately fragmented just as our thoughts, if verbalised, would be. It is via a jigsaw-like process, then, that the reader must piece together a story in the linear sense and make up his/her mind as to what actually occurred. This makes the novel both intriguing and frustrating as the perspectives of each of the brothers, Benjy, Quentin, and the money-obsessed Jason, differ considerably thereby presenting the reader with equally different views of Caddy. What is undeniable, however, is that this novel really is an astounding literary achievement as the strands that make it into a whole are arranged in such a way that, in order to truly gain a comprehensive sense of what has taken place, the novel would have to be re-read and re-read.