While The Sound and the Fury is stylistically complex and often challenging to read, the story itself is essentially a tale of a once-powerful family in irreversible decline. Father has died from excessive drinking; Mother is weak-willed and (spiritually) ill; the eldest son has died by suicide, while the youngest son has a mental disability. The middle son is consumed with bitterness and resentment, and he is a habitual liar and a thief. The lone daughter has been exiled from the family for defying their antiquated standards of female behavior.

The Compson family, in turn, serves as a synecdoche for the Old South as a whole: The values to which the Compsons cling and to which the Old South adheres—including notions of white superiority, the repression of female sexuality, and an unshakeable sense of entitlement—are outdated and corrupt. The idea that a family’s reputation—its good name, as it were—functions as a form of legitimate and undisputed socio-cultural currency is a relic of a bygone era. The pride to which Mother so fiercely subscribes and Jason hollowly mimics buckles beneath the weight of history and the bad fortune of the family.

The notion of pride precipitating a fall comes directly from biblical text: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18).