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 play, information about the characters' sexuality, sexual symbols, and unfulfilled desires presents itself, with each commenting directly and indirectly on each other. TS Eliot's "The Waste Land" serves as a useful lens through which to understand the requirements for escaping the wastelands of the ruined Compson family by providing a backdrop against which The Sound and the Fury can be projected. In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner experiments with the placement 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. TS Eliot's "The Waste Land" offers an interpretation of the modern world which, on the one hand, highlights the disillusionment of the future in a fragmented and stripped-down world, and on the other hand, presents an argument for the recognition of the freedom and meaning in the “heap of broken images” that make up the modern climate. The opening segment “The Burial of the Dead” looks toward a future composed of fragments and paradoxes. The fragments of the wastelands presented are those of memory. More specifically, the fragments represent the inability of the human condition to connect memories of the past with those of the present in a hopeful and inspiring way. 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, by remembering the past and foreseeing the future, she...... in the middle of a paper.. ....cter's sexual desire but rather puts forward pieces of images to suggest meaning. This allows the reader to interpret which version of sexual desire is better. In a way, the text offers as many interpretations of sexuality in the modern sense of the term as there are readers since the source of sexual desire is not always clearly indicated. Faulkner thus implements a circular logic to understand sexuality in the modern world. It is the cause of moral decline in the modern world, but sexual desire arises from the need to reconstitute the modern world in one way or another. Ultimately, one can read The Sound and the Fury through the lens of Eliot's "The Waste Land" to understand the importance of holding on to just enough of the past while moving toward the future, allowing to the desires to seize and guide the characters to a destination that provides insight into the self.