Faulkner presents sexual desire in The Sound and the Fury as a paradox of both entrapment and freedom. As he progresses through the non-linear piece, information about the characters' sexuality, sexual symbols, and unfulfilled desire is presented, each commenting on one another directly and indirectly. T. S. Eliot's “The Waste Land” serves as a useful lens for understanding the requirements of escaping the ruined Compson family's wasteland, providing a backdrop onto which The Sound and the Fury can be projected. In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner experiments with the location of the individual in relation to time and other characters in order to introduce sexual discourse in a way that comments on the need for sexual understanding in the modern world. T. S. Eliot's “The Waste Land” offers an interpretation of the modern world that on the one hand emphasizes the disillusionment of the future in a fragmented and naked world, and on the other hand presents the need to recognize freedom and meaning in the “heap of broken images ” that constitute the modern climate. The opening segment “The Burial of the Dead” looks at a future composed of fragments and paradoxes. The fragments in the wasteland that is presented are those of memory. More specifically, the fragments represent a failure in the human condition to connect memories of the past to those of the present in a way that is hopeful and inspiring. Jewel Spears Brooker and Joseph Bentley present this concept in Reading the Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation. Here they describe a wasteland in which “She [Marie] perceives the dualistic and paradoxical present as cruel because, in remembering the past and intuiting the future, she desires but rather marshals fragments of images to suggest meaning. This allows the reader to interpret which version of sexual desire is best. In a sense, the text offers as many interpretations of sexuality in the modern sense as there are readers, since the source of sexual desire is not always clearly indicated. Faulkner thus implements a circular logic for understanding sexuality in the modern world. It is the cause of moral decay in the modern world, but sexual desire arises from the need to somehow bring the modern world together. Ultimately, one can read The Sound and the Fury through the lens of Eliot's “The Waste Land” to grasp the importance of holding on to just enough of the past while moving forward into the future, allowing desires to take over. upper hand and guide the characters towards a destination that offers a vision of themselves.