The Sound and the Fury

William Faulkner
1929

Introduction

The Sound and the Fury, published in 1929, was William Faulkner's fourth novel and is considered his first masterpiece. The story is set in the fictional county of Yoknapatawpha that Faulkner created for the setting of his third novel Sartoris. Faulkner set fifteen of his novels and many short stories in this geographical location that he invented, the descriptions of which mirror the area in northern Mississippi where he spent most of his life. While he is called a Southern writer, most critics praise this book and many of Faulkner's other fictional works for their universal and humanistic themes. The book was published in the year of the great stock market crash on Wall Street in 1929 and sales were meager. Faulkner did, however, gain considerable critical recognition for the work.

Before writing The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner found himself overly involved with the problem of selling his previous books to publishers. He decided to refocus his attention back on his writing so that he could create a finely crafted work. The result was The Sound and the Fury. The inspiration for the novel came from one of his short stories, "Twilight." He had created the character of Caddy in this story. In a scene where Caddy has climbed a pear tree to look into the window where her grandmother's funeral is being held, her brothers are looking up at her and they see her muddy pants. Faulkner claimed he loved the character of Caddy so much that he felt she deserved more than a short story. Thus the idea for The Sound and the Fury was born.

Author Biography

The oldest of four sons of Murry Cuthbert Falkner and Maud Butler Falkner, William Cuthbert Falkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897. (He changed the spelling of his name in 1918.) When he was five years old, his family moved to Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkner would spend much of his life. Faulkner's ancestors came to America from Scotland during the eighteenth century. William Clark Falkner, his great-grandfather, was a source of inspiration for the young Faulkner. William Clark had been a colonel in the Civil War, built railroads, and had also written a popular romance in 1881 called The White Rose of Memphis. He was murdered on the street by a business partner, and Faulkner re-created this event several times in his fiction. Faulkner also used his great-grandfather as the model for his fictional character Colonel John Sartoris in his 1929 novel Sartoris.

Faulkner did not complete his last year of high school, nor did he complete a college education, although he was admitted to the University of Mississippi as a special student. He served briefly in the Canadian branch of the Royal Air Force during World War I after being rejected by the United States Army because he did not meet the weight and height requirements. The war ended before he could participate in any action, however. After the war he worked in various clerical and building jobs until he could establish himself as a full-time writer.

Faulkner's writing career began with poems, some of which were published. A play he wrote was performed in 1921, and his first book of poems was published in 1924. In 1925 he met Sherwood Anderson, best known as the author of Winesburg, Ohio, who influenced him to become a fiction writer. (The pieces he wrote during the period he spent with Anderson in New Orleans were collected in 1958 under the title of New Orleans Sketches.) Following the trend of other American writers, Faulkner made a six-month tour of Europe in 1925. On his return to the United States, he began writing seriously. He produced his first novel in 1926 and his second in 1927. His third, Sartoris, in which he introduced the fictional Yoknapatawpha county, was published in 1929. That year also saw the appearance of The Sound and the Fury, the work which first gained him critical notice. In 1929 he also married his high-school sweetheart, Lida Estelle Oldham Franklin. They had two daughters, one of whom died in infancy. He also helped raise two stepchildren.

Except for brief periods during the early 1930s and early 1940s, when Faulkner went to Hollywood as a screenwriter and produced scripts for such films as To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, he spent most of his time in Oxford, Mississippi, writing stories and novels. In 1949, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature and in 1955 he received the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for A Fable, a story of France during World War I. Already suffering from failing health, Faulkner suffered a number of injuries caused by falls from horses. After being admitted to the hospital for one such injury, he died of a heart attack on July 6, 1962. Faulkner produced a sizable body of work that includes a number of critically acclaimed masterpieces.

Plot Summary

April Seventh, 1928

Set in Mississippi during the early decades of the twentieth century, The Sound and the Fury tells the tumultuous story of the Compson family's gradual deterioration. The novel is divided into four sections, each told by a different narrator on a different date. The three Compson brothers, Benjy, Quentin, and Jason, each relate one of the first three sections while the fourth is told from an omniscient, third-person perspective. At the center of the novel is the brothers' sister, Caddy Compson, who, as an adult, becomes a source of obsessive love for two of her brothers, and inspires savage revenge in the third.

The first section is narrated by Benjy, a thirty-three-year-old mentally handicapped man who is unable to speak and doesn't fully comprehend the world around him. His perceptions in the present are combined with memories of childhood and adolescence and, as a result, his narrative provides a disjointed and incomplete interpretation of events. In the opening scene, Benjy is standing by a fence near a golf course where the regularly heard cry of "here, caddie" is a constant reminder of the sister who has now married and left home. He is accompanied by one of the family's servants, Luster, who is trying to find the quarter he lost so he can go to the travelling show playing in town that night. As they crawl through a broken place in the fence, Benjy snags himself on a nail and is immediately reminded of a similar experience he had with Caddy. From here, Benjy's monologue continues to shift back and forth between the present and the past.

Although the significance of many of Benjy's fragmented memories is not immediately evident, several important incidents are revealed. What is most apparent is Benjy's strong attachment to Caddy, who smells "like trees." It has been almost eighteen years since Caddy's wedding, yet Benjy continues to await her return at the fence. Besides her wedding day, other significant memories include the changing of Benjy's name from Maury, the image of Caddy's muddy drawers as she climbs the pear tree, and an incident at the fence involving a young school girl.

June Second, 1910

The novel's second section relates Quentin's final day before he commits suicide. Quentin is a student at Harvard but his obsessive thoughts about his sister's sexuality and marriage of convenience to Herbert Head far outweigh any academic aspirations. Memories of past events again intrude on the present and, as a result, Quentin's narration is not unlike Benjy's. (The technique, where thoughts interrupt each other and move back and forth, is known as "stream-of-consciousness.") However, Quentin's intense awareness of time lends his section a more coherent structure. He wakes to the sound of his watch, a gift from his father intended to help him "forget [time] now and then," twists off its hands and, instead of attending his morning classes, prepares for his death. He packs a trunk, mails a letter to his father, and purchases some flat-iron weights.

Quentin makes his way to the train station. Once out of town, Quentin goes for a walk along a river. He recalls his attempt to prevent Caddy from marrying Herbert by proposing that they and Benjy run away someplace where nobody knows them. As he is walking, Quentin encounters a little girl whom he addresses as "sister." He buys the girl an ice cream and is attempting to help her find her way home when her brother suddenly appears and accuses Quentin of kidnapping his sister. Quentin is eventually cleared of the accusations and drives away with some friends from school. His thoughts, however, remain focused on Caddy. He reflects upon his unsuccessful attempt to confront Dalton Ames, the man who may have impregnated Caddy, and is seemingly unaware of the present moment when he strikes the boasting Gerald Bland in the car. He eventually returns to his room in town and makes the final preparations for his suicide. As he is doing so, he recalls a conversation he had with his father concerning his feelings for Caddy and his desperate attempt to prevent her marriage:

.…and he i think you are too serious to give me any cause for alarm you wouldn't have felt driven to the expedient of telling me you had committed incest otherwise and i i wasnt lying i wasnt lying and he you wanted to sublimate a piece of natural human folly into a horror and then exorcise it with truth and i it was to isolate her out of the loud world so that it would have to flee us of necessity and then the sound of it would be as though it had never been and he did you try to make her do it and i i was afraid to i was afraid she might and then it wouldnt have done any good but if i could tell you we did it would have been so and then the others wouldnt be so and then the world would roar away and he and now this other you are not lying now either but you are still blind to what is in yourself.… you cannot bear to think that someday it will no longer hurt you like this now.

Quentin then brushes his teeth, turns out the light, and leaves the room. It is revealed in the following section that he took his own life by drowning himself.

April Sixth, 1928

The confusion and obsession which characterize the first and second sections, respectively, become anger and brutal sarcasm in the third. Jason's opening words set the tone: "Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say." He is referring to Caddy's daughter, Quentin, who has just received a warning from school concerning her frequent absences. Jason brings her to school himself and then stops by the post office and goes to his job at Earl's store. As he is going through his mail, he recalls how Quentin was first sent to live with the family after Caddy was cast off by her husband. Caddy has only seen her daughter once since that time. After her father's funeral, she paid Jason fifty dollars to see Quentin, and he drove by with Quentin in a carriage, allowing Caddy only a glimpse of the girl. The first letter Jason opens is addressed to Mrs. Compson and contains the monthly check Caddy sends to support her daughter. Jason has been keeping this money for himself as compensation for the job he was promised by Herbert but never got. He replaces the checks with fakes that he bums in front of his mother. A second letter, addressed to Quentin, contains a money order for fifty dollars. He later pressures Quentin into signing it over to him without disclosing its true value.

That afternoon, Jason catches Quentin walking past the store with a man from the show. He eventually chases them down a wagon road with his car, but they manage to give him the slip and leave him stranded by deflating one of his tires. When he finally makes his way home, he cruelly teases Luster by burning free tickets to the show that Luster desperately wants to see. He refuses to sit down to dinner until Dilsey, another of the family's servants, gets the entire family to join him at the table. Quentin and Mrs. Compson come down to dinner and Jason taunts his niece by making up a story about how, earlier that day, he lent his car to one of the show men so that he could pursue his sister's husband who was out riding with "some town woman." He interrupts himself and tells his mother that he will continue the story later because he does not "like to talk about such things before Quentin."

April Eighth, 1928

It is now Easter Sunday and, as Dilsey is serving breakfast, Jason descends from his room and accuses Luster and Benjy of breaking his bedroom window. It is only when Dilsey goes up to wake Quentin that Jason figures out what has happened. He rushes upstairs and finds Quentin's room empty and her bed undisturbed. He also discovers that the metal box he keeps hidden in his closet has been broken into. Jason calls the sheriff to report a robbery and leaves the house. A little while later, Dilsey, Luster, and Benjy attend a special Easter service where they hear visiting preacher, Reverend Shegog, deliver a stirring sermon. Meanwhile, Jason has driven to Mottson, the next stop for the travelling show, and attempts to find Quentin and the twice-stolen money. However, his trip is unsuccessful and he is finally obliged to hire a man to bring him back home because he has a severe headache from a scuffle with one of the showmen. Upon his return to town, he crosses Luster and Benjy as they are approaching the town square in the family's surrey. Luster swings to the "wrong" side of the monument and Benjy begins to shriek in horror. Jason hurls Luster aside, sets the surrey on the "right" side of the monument and sends the two back home. Benjy finally ends his hollering when he sees that "cornice and facade flowed smoothly once more from left to right," and that "post and tree, window and doorway and signboard [were] each in its ordered place."

Characters

Dalton Ames

One of Caddy's lovers who may have made her pregnant. In his monologue, Caddy's brother Quentin remembers his failed confrontation with Dalton Ames over Caddy and tries to deny Ames's role in Caddy's life.

Sheriff Anse

Jason tries to get the sheriff to help him catch his niece Quentin after she robs him and runs away from home. The sheriff refuses to help him, saying he figures the money was probably not Jason's to begin with.

Maury L. Bascomb

Mrs. Compson's brother and an uncle to the Compson children. Benjy is named after Uncle Maury when he is born, but Mrs. Compson changes his name to Benjamin when she learns he is retarded. Uncle Maury appears in Benjy's monologue, humoring his sister's complaints. In Jason's story, Uncle Maury is shown borrowing yet another sum of money from his sister in order to pursue a dubious business deal. In his "Appendix: Compson 1699–1945," Faulkner describes Maury as a "handsome flashing swaggering workless bachelor who borrowed money from almost anyone."

Gerald Bland

One of Quentin's acquaintances at Harvard. He is spoiled by his indulgent mother, who puts on parties for him and allows him a car. When Gerald begins boasting of his success with women, a distracted Quentin tries to punch him. Gerald is a boxer, however, and bloodies Quentin without damage to himself.

Charlie

One of Caddy's boyfriends. He appears as a memory in Benjy's section. Charlie is obviously trying to make out with Caddy and she is pushing him away because Benjy is with her.

Benjamin Compson

Benjy is the youngest of the Compson brothers. He had orignally been named after his uncle Maury, but when the Compsons discover that he is retarded, they change his name to Benjamin. The first section of the book, "April Seventh, 1928," is Benjy's monologue. Benjy sees the world in terms of sights and sounds, and his narration reflects this emphasis. At the time of this section, Benjy is thirty-three years old, making him the same age as Jesus was when he was crucified. His brother Jason has despised him since childhood, when he destroyed the paper dolls Benjy and Caddy made. As head of the family, Jason has Benjy castrated when he makes advances to a young girl. After their mother dies, Jason has Benjy put into a mental hospital.

Benjy loves his sister Caddy, and his monologue mainly consists of memories of her. Caddy treats him with love and affection, unlike his mother Caroline, a complaining, dependent woman who treats him as a shameful nuisance. Benjy has never recovered from Caddy's leaving the family after her pregnancy. His thoughts reflect this loss, and his memories focus on Caddy's budding sexuality as if he knows this was the cause of her exile. His positive memories of his sister include her "smelling like trees," and his sad ones relate his bellowing whenever she shows signs of womanhood—putting on perfume or sitting with a boyfriend. At the conclusion of the novel, Benjy hears a golfer call for his "caddie" and bellows his grief once again: "it was horror; shock; agony eyeless, tongueless; just sound." Benjy can be seen as a personification of innocence in the novel.

Benjy Compson

See Benjamin Compson

Caddy Compson

Caddy is the central character of the novel, even though none of the narration is seen through her eyes. In each of the three sections that represent the internal monologues of her brothers, she is of primary concern to them. The reader learns about Caddy through each of her brothers. They are all involved with her, but each in a different way. To a large extent, the brothers' characters are formed around their responses to Caddy. Benjy and Quentin love her in two distinct ways. Jason despises her as he does everything and everyone else. Caddy is the most normal of the Compson children. As the novel progresses and the pieces of her life unfold, she is seen as a young girl. She is loving in her relationships to Benjy and Quentin, but she also matures and has boyfriends. When Caddy becomes pregnant by one of them (perhaps Dalton Ames), she does the socially correct thing and marries another man, Herbert Head, who will be able to provide financially for her and her child. After her husband learns that her daughter is not his child, he turns her out. Caddy leaves her daughter, whom she has named after her dead brother Quentin, with the Compsons. She leaves the Compson home but sends money to support her daughter. In his "Appendix: Compson 1699–1945," Faulkner describes how Caddy travelled to Mexico and Paris after a second divorce and was never heard from again. According to the author, Caddy was "doomed and knew it, accepted the doom without either seeking it or fleeing it."

Media Adaptations

• Jerry Wald produced and Martin Ritt directed a film version of The Sound and the Fury in 1959. Jason was played by Yul Brynner and Benjy by Jack Warden. Margaret Leighton portrayed Caddy and Joanne Woodward played her daughter, Quentin. Ethel Waters was cast in the role of Dilsey. Unavailable on video.

Candace Compson

See Caddy Compson

Mrs. Carolyn Bascomb Compson

The mother of Benjy, Jason, Quentin, and Caddy. Mrs. Compson is depicted as a negligent mother. She is a self-absorbed hypochondriac and spends a great deal of time in bed. She does not show any maternal feelings for her children. Their care and nurturing are left mostly to Dilsey, the Compson's African-American housekeeper.

Jason Compson III

The father of Quentin, Jason, Benjy, and Caddy. Mr. Compson is a retired lawyer and has become an alcoholic. He is already dead at the time of the novel in 1928, and is shown in flashback during Benjy's and Jason's narrations. His deterioration accelerates after losing his oldest son Quentin to suicide and his daughter Caddy to marriage. He also loses much of his social position, because he has had to sell the last of his inherited estate in order to pay for Caddy's wedding and Quentin's tuition to Harvard. In his conversations with his children, especially Quentin, Mr. Compson is shown as cynical.

Jason Compson IV

The middle son of the Compson family. After his brother Quentin's suicide and the death of his father, Jason is the head of the family. Throughout the novel Jason is shown as a cold-blooded person. Mrs. Compson, however, sees him as the only one of her children with any common sense; in his "Appendix: Compson 1699–1945," Faulkner describes him as "the first sane Compson since before Culloden and (a childless bachelor) hence the last." Jason does seem attached to the real world more than his other siblings. He sees the necessity of succeeding in society, which he translates as the need to make money. Because of his rationality, the only person he fears and respects is Dilsey, the family's black housekeeper—"his sworn enemy since birth."

Jason is embittered by whatever seems to get in his way. He resents his parents for sending his brother Quentin to Harvard and seems eaten up by jealousy. He is angry with his sister Caddy because he believes her promiscuity caused her divorce and thus his chances of getting a job in her husband's bank. When Caddy leaves her daughter Quentin with the Compsons after her divorce, he schemes to keep the money Caddy sends for Quentin's support for himself. He further takes revenge by preventing Caddy from seeing her daughter, even briefly, and by treating the girl spitefully and with contempt. When his niece Quentin attempts to assert herself, Jason reacts cruelly and angrily. He finds her behavior a reflection of Caddy's actions, which he believed caused his present unhappy state. Quentin finally rebels and steals Jason's money and runs away—not just the $4000 he swindled from her but an additional $2800 in his own savings besides. Jason is beside himself and tries to find her and have her arrested. In terms of his anger, Jason is a man out of control, even though he is able to meet the practical demands of making a living. Although he is later seen as a moderately successful businessman, Jason is the final representation of the Compson family's downfall.

Maury Compson

See Benjamin Compson

Quentin Compson

The eldest son of the Compsons. Quentin's monologue, the second section of the book, takes place on June 2,1910, while he is a student at Harvard. It is the day Quentin decides to commit suicide and the whole monologue details the events of this day and the events that led up to his decision to take his life. Faulkner's themes of family pride and the changes wrought on an individual over time are played out in Quentin's character. He cannot stand the changes that have taken place in his relationship with his sister Caddy, for whom he has incestuous feelings. He is devastated when she reaches sexual maturity and obsesses over her relationships with men. But as Faulkner writes in his "Appendix: Compson 1699–1945," Quentin loves "not his sister's body but some concept of Compson honour precariously and (he knew well) only temporarily supported by the minute fragile membrane of her maidenhead."

The notion that Quentin's preoccupation with an outdated ideal of family "honor" has been much commented on by critics. The loss of the innocence that Quentin witnesses in Caddy's "fall" is something that he finds intolerable. He cannot accept his father's reassurances that in time his pain "will no longer hurt like this now," for that would make his pain meaningless. Unable to adjust, seeing no other alternative, Quentin commits suicide. As the child for whom the Compson parents sacrificed so much, his death is a terrible loss to the family. His death is also symbolic of the feeling of meaninglessness of life for the Compson family, particularly for Mr. Compson, who uses alcohol to blunt his sense of purposelessness.

Damuddy

The Compson children's grandmother. In his narration, Benjy recalls the day of her funeral, when Caddy climbs up a tree to peer in a window while her brothers and Dilsey's children watch her muddy underpants.

Deacon

An African-American porter at the train station near Harvard who hires himself out to Southern students he meets at the station. He has been "guide mentor and friend to unnumbered crops of innocent and lonely freshman," Quentin says. Deacon tells Quentin that "you and me's the same folk, come long and short." This parallels Quentin's observation that "a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behaviour" and that "the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are."

Earl

Jason's supervisor at the store where he works. He puts up with Jason's lateness and rude talk, even though he suspects Jason of robbing his own mother, because he feels sorry for Mrs. Compson.

Dilsey Gibson

The Compson housekeeper, who is seen to be the most positive character in the novel. Dilsey is the person who nurtures the Compson children, since both their mother and father are incapable of displaying love and affection. Her service to the family, even as she suffers from arthritis, is in stark contrast to Mrs. Compson's neglect due to imagined illnesses. She is the only character that is able to embrace the meaning of life and accept a sense of family history. Her section is the fourth and final one and takes place on Easter Sunday, a time of resurrection. An inspiring sermon is an important part of the section and both Dilsey and Benjy, whom Dilsey has brought along to church, are spiritually moved. Dilsey's response, unlike Benjy's, is more than an emotional one. She experiences an epiphany—a sudden perception of truth—and tells her children "I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin." Some critics have interpreted this as a comment on the fall of the Compson family.

Through what is often called the "Dilsey" section of the novel, the author's point of view is expressed. Faulkner handles this by telling her story through the third person. It is through Dilsey's tireless caring for the elder Compsons and their children that the author expresses his belief in the enduring quality of humanity. She is portrayed as a selfless and realistic person. She understands the behavior of all the children and accepts life in all its aspects because of a faith which flows from Christian love.

Frony Gibson

Dilsey's daughter. When Dilsey, Benjy, and Frony are at church on Easter Sunday, Frony has to speak for her mother when Dilsey refuses to answer some youngsters who ask how she's doing. Frony answers for her out of a sense of common courtesy. Dilsey is shown here to have the capacity to be somewhat scornful of others, a quality that has also been attributed to the author.

Luster Gibson

Dilsey's grandson, whose primary function is as Benjy's caretaker. As Faulkner writes in the "Appendix: Compson 1699–1945," Luster is "a man, aged fourteen" who is "capable of the complete care and security of an idiot twice his age and three times his size." He is with Benjy during the opening scenes of Benjy's monologue. They pass the golf course where Benjy begins to cry upon hearing the word "caddie" called it. This reminds him of his sister Caddy. Luster sometimes teases Benjy, but for the most part he comforts and guides Benjy.

Roskus Gibson

Dilsey's husband. Roskus appears in Benjy's monologue. Benjy sees him milking the cow in the barn. Roskus is critical of the Compsons in many ways. Among other things, he disapproves of their changing Benjy's name after they realized he was retarded.

T. P Gibson

One of Dilsey's sons, who is beginning to take jobs over from his ailing father Roskus. He appears in Benjy's section struggling to control the horse Queenie when he is told to take the reins. Mrs. Compson is uneasy about his handling the reins also. When Benjy recalls Caddy's wedding, he remembers his brother Quentin hitting young T.P. and knocking him into the pigpen. The good-natured T.P. seems to take it all in fun, and continues his care of Benjy. Later Luster is shown taking over similar tasks from T.P.

Versh Gibson

Another son of Dilsey's. Benjy likes to go to Versh's house for the smell of the fire.

Sydney Herbert Head

Called Herbert, he is Caddy's fiance and later her husband. He turns Caddy out when he discovers that he is not the father of Miss Quentin. While he is engaged to Caddy, he has a conversation with her brother Quentin about cheating that illustrates Quentin's rigid view of ethics and morality.

Uncle Maury

See Maury L. Bascomb

Miss Quentin

Caddy's daughter, whose father is uncertain but may be Dalton Ames. When Caddy's husband Herbert Head, discovers Quentin is not his, he divorces Caddy. The Compsons also disown their disgraced daughter. Unable to support Quentin, Caddy brings her daughter home to be brought up by the Compsons. She leaves but sends support money for her daughter. Jason uses the money to save for himself. When at age seventeen Quentin has had enough of Jason's mistreatment, she steals the money from his strong box—including some of his own savings—and runs away. Jason attempts to pursue her to recover his money. He has nothing but contempt for her, seeing in her a reflection of Caddy, whom he blames for all his troubles.

Reverend Shegog

The guest preacher at the Easter Sunday service Dilsey attends with Frony and Benjy. He is a fiery speaker and moves both Benjy and Dilsey to tears. His appearance, which is small and undistinguished, contrasts sharply with that of the regular preacher at Dilsey's church, who is large and impressive. Rev. Shegog's sermon, which progresses from a cold tone to a rousing, passionate plea, leaves Benjy rapt and Dilsey in tears.

Shreve

Quentin's roommate at Harvard. He is friendly and concerned for Quentin's well-being, so much so that Spoade teasingly calls Shreve Quentin's "husband." He is one of the two people for whom Quentin leaves a suicide note.

Spoade

One of Quentin's friends at Harvard. He has "cold, quizzical eyes" and teasingly calls Shreve Quentin's "husband." Although he is Quentin's friend, he is puzzled by his behavior.

St. Louis preacher

See Reverend Shegog

Themes

Time

The themes in The Sound and the Fury are so closely interwoven with the characters and structure of the novel that it is difficult to separate these elements. In all four sections of the novel, however, time is an important theme that Faulkner develops. The central characters of the four sections each cope with time in a different way. In the first section, Benjy's sense of time is defective. His thoughts move from present to past time without the ability to grasp the real meaning of events. Benjy is free from time because he cannot understand its impact on his feelings. Quentin's efforts to cope with the present are impeded by his memories. He cannot accept the changes in his life that time inevitably brings. His sense of loss over the innocence of his childhood love of Caddy is unbearable. Rather than deal with life's changes over time, he puts an end to time by committing suicide. Jason, on the other hand, lives in time present, around which all his actions flow. By living in time present, Jason reacts to events as they occur, unlike Quentin who acts on time past. In the last section of the book, Dilsey represents another view of time. Hers is a historical view. She embraces all of her life experiences and those of the Compsons with a religious faith about the timelessness of life. Her view most closely reflects the author's view-point on time. By having the novel cover four days, each section representing one day, Faulkner is able to use time to give the novel a tight framework.

Topics for Further Study

• Research mental retardation and discuss the accuracy of Faulkner's portrayal of Benjy. Compare public attitudes toward mental impairment and illness today to the attitudes shown in Faulkner's novel.
• Discuss the importance of Dilsey's role in the novel. What do you think is Faulkner saying about race relations in the book and how does his portrayal compare with current depictions of African Americans in literature or the media?
• Find information about other cultures' attitude toward incest. Discuss the concept of incest as a taboo, and from both a moral and biological perspective.
• Compare Faulkner's style in The Sound and the Fury with James Joyce's use of the subjective point of view in The Dubliners or The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Pride

Pride is the undoing of the Compson family. The loss of their property and status demoralizes the elder Compsons, Caroline and Jason III, the parents of Benjy, Quentin, Jason, and Caddy. Out of their sense of family pride and their economic and social decline, they turn inward. Mr. Compson turns to alcohol in his sense of loss. Mrs. Compson retreats to her bed and self-pity. Quentin's concern over the family "honor" and how Caddy has shamed the family lead him to kill himself. The younger Jason is racked with pride and it is his undoing. With him it is both pride and jealousy. He feels cheated and feels that he deserves better. Caddy deceived him, he thinks, and he uses this to justify stealing from her. When Caddy's daughter, Quentin, steals from her uncle, Jason, he is outraged that he has been undone. Faulkner shows the tragic results of pride in the characters of these Compson family members.

Love and Passion

Natural and unnatural love among siblings, love between the sexes, and Christian love are themes that pervade The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner shows the love the Compson brothers have for Caddy. Benjy loves the care she gave him when they were young. When he hears the word "caddie" called out on the golf course, he moans because it sounds like her name. He misses her after she leaves home to marry. Benjy's love is the love of an innocent for someone who has shown him affection. Quentin's love for his sister Caddy is an unnatural one. He has incestuous feelings for her. He is jealous of her boyfriends and denies that she has had lovers. He fantasizes an incestuous relationship between them, although Faulkner writes in his "Appendix: Compson 1699–1945" that Quentin "loved not the idea of the incest which he would not commit, but some presbyterian concept of its eternal punishment: he, not God, could by that means cast himself and his sister both into hell, where he could guard her forever and keep her forevermore intact amid the eternal fires." Caddy, as she is presented through her brothers' monologues, seems to develop in a natural way. As a child, she shows love toward Benjy and Quentin. As a young woman, she has lovers, becomes pregnant, marries, and leaves home. Christian love is the thematic note on which the book ends. Through Dilsey, Faulkner presents the view of love that springs from religious faith, a love that endures pain and accepts reality.

Sanity and Insanity

The contrast between Benjy and Jason reflects a theme of sanity and insanity in The Sound and the Fury. An idiot who does not comprehend reality, Benjy displays a world in chaos through his monologue. Faulkner uses his character to explore the meaninglessness of sensory reactions to sounds, sights, and language. Quentin's suicide also can be regarded as an act of insanity because it comes from his inability to deal with reality. Mr. Compson's alcoholism can be seen as a slow suicide. It is an unnatural retreat from reality, as is Mrs. Compson's retreat to her bed. The two characters who emerge as sane in the novel are Jason and Dilsey. Dilsey's sanity is rooted in her total acceptance of the realities of life. Jason also deals with the here and now, but his sanity is perverted by his resentments.

Style

Structure

Faulkner has created an unusual structure in The Sound and the Fury. The story takes place over a period of four days, each of which is seen through the eyes of a different character. The first part of the book is the monologue of Benjy on April 7, 1928, the day before Easter. The second part of the book belongs to Quentin on the day of his suicide on June 2, 1910. Jason, the son, is the focus of the third section, April 6, 1928, which covers Good Friday, the day before Benjy's monologue. The fourth and final section takes place on Easter Sunday, April 8, 1928. The story is not related by a single individual, but is often referred to as Dilsey's section. In a fragmented way, the story of the Compson family and their tragedy is gradually pieced together. Each section adds bits and pieces of the history of the Compson family. Benjy's account covers a period of twenty-five years. Quentin's story ends earlier than the other two brothers, since he has committed suicide in 1910. In this section the reader learns more about the family's early relationships. Jason's section, the third in the book, reveals more of the dark side of the Compson family. This section echoes the religious events of Christ's betrayal on Good Friday. The betrayal is by young Quentin, who steals money from her Uncle Jason and runs away from home. Dilsey's section, the fourth and last, reveals Faulkner's affirmation of her enduring qualities. It is Dilsey who has cared for and tried to keep the family intact for decades. The final section contains an Easter Sunday service in an African-American church. The church service affirms Dilsey's acceptance of Christian love, an event some critics have interpreted as echoing the resurrection of Christ.

Point of View

By dividing the story into four sections, Faulkner is able to present the Compson story from four separate points of view. As he moves from Benjy's perspective to Quentin's to Jason's and finally to the voice of an omniscient, third-person narrator, the author presents the story as if it were a patchwork quilt. It is only when all the pieces are finally put together that the reader knows the tragic events of the Compson family and the extent of their decline. While this changing point of view adds to the complexity of the book, it also adds a depth of understanding to the individual characters and their story. Faulkner seemed to understand that if he told the story from only one point of view, he would not be able to delve deeply into the nature and motives for his characters' behavior. When one person tells a story, something is always left out. When many tell a story, it is never quite the same story, but the listener or reader then becomes more involved because he or she must think about it from those different perspectives. This is the effect of reading The Sound and the Fury. The first three sections that focus on the Compson brothers also explore their distinct perceptions of their sister Caddy. In this way she also becomes a central character, but only as she is seen by others, never from her point of view. By writing the final section in the third person, Faulkner can present his overview through Dilsey. Her perception of the Compsons and their decline reflects the author's tragic vision of the universal human struggle to find meaning in life.

Interior Monologue

Except in the last section, the narrations of The Sound and the Fury are interior monologues. Interior monologues are narratives in which characters' thoughts are revealed in a way that appears to be uncontrolled by the author. The chaotic thoughts of Benjy narrate the first section. He also records what is said around him without understanding it. Quentin's inner voice relates his experiences in the Compson family and details his thoughts and behavior on the day of his suicide. Jason's inner voice relates the third part of the book. By this method, Faulkner lets the reader see the nature of all three characters without describing them. Because we know what these three characters are thinking, they are clearly focused in the novel. Many of the other characters, particularly the Compson parents and Caddy, are less clearly drawn, because we always see them through the eyes of Benjy, Quentin, or Jason. Dilsey's section is not written as an interior monologue and the reader sees her character from her behavior and her dialogue.

Stream of Consciousness

"Stream of consciousness" writing is designed to give the impression of the everchanging, spontaneous, and seemingly illogical series of thoughts, emotions, images, and memories that make up real-life thought. Faulkner was influenced by the writings of Irish novelist James Joyce, who had developed the use of stream of consciousness in his novel Ulysses. Many writers of the period, including Faulkner, were influenced by Joyce's use of this technique. Within some of the interior monologues in The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner uses techniques peculiar to stream of consciousness. An absence of punctuation and capitalization characterizes stream of consciousness, as well as the repetition of words and phrases. Changes in type, such as switching to italics, can also be used effectively to portray changes in thought. While the writing of this book came early in his career, Faulkner showed a mastery of this technique. It has been largely abandoned by contemporary novelists, who still frequently use the interior monologue.

Setting

Although most of the action of The Sound and the Fury is communicated through the characters' inner thoughts, their physical situation also plays a significant role in the novel. Faulkner created the fictional Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha in his third novel, Sartoris, and revisited it in many of his subsequent works, including The Sound and the Fury. This setting of the South in the 1920s figures very prominently into the character of Quentin. He is holding on to an outdated ideal of the Southern gentleman, one who upholds the family's honor and protects those in his care, especially women. His sister Caddy, who acts according to more liberated standards of behavior, forces him to realize his ideals cannot survive in the modern world. When she becomes pregnant out of wedlock, it is both a stain on the family honor and a sign that Quentin has failed to protect her. Changing ideas of race relations also figure in Quentin's narrative, which takes place in the Northeast. This contrast in setting causes Quentin to consider the difference in race relations in the North and South. From this difference he gains the insight that "the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone."

Historical Context

The Impact of the Civil War on the South

The loss of the Civil War in the nineteenth century had a profound impact on the psyche of the south. The region not only lost the war, but their whole way of life as well. The aristocratic structure of slavery was destroyed when the South lost the war, but many of the social values remained. Whites still controlled the economic and social structure of the region. Blacks, while no longer slaves, were generally under the rule of white society. What evolved over the next hundred years in the South was a society where blacks were legally free, but socially disenfranchised from an equal education and equal economic opportunities. The relationship of the blacks to whites depicted by Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury reflects that social and economic divide. The blacks in the novel are servants of the Compsons. Their role as servant is expanded by Faulkner to that of spiritual caretaker, especially as he portrays the character of Dilsey.

In conjunction with the South's defeat in the Civil War was the area's lessening economic influence. During the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, industrial and manufacturing businesses came to dominate the U.S. economy. Agriculture, the mainstay of the Southern economy, was less profitable, especially for relatively small family farms. The economic problems of the South can be seen in the way Faulkner portrays the Compsons. Their economic decline spans several generations, each one experiencing a greater decline. By 1910, Jason's father is forced to sell the last of the family's land to pay for Caddy's wedding and Quentin's tuition. Jason, the central character of section three, is left to work in a local store to support the family. He reflects the attitude expressed by President Calvin Coolidge during the prosperity of the 1920s that "the business of America is business." Even during the boom period of the 1920s, the textile industry suffered a depression. As a cotton-producing region, the South was hurt economically. The stock market crash of 1929 came just as The Sound and the Fury hit the book market. The Great Depression that followed in the 1930s made it difficult for Faulkner to succeed economically with his writing.

The "Lost" Generation

A counterpoint to the bleakness that followed the 1929 stock market crash and the depression of the 1930s was the proliferation of artistic accomplishments. No other period in American history had a generation that produced so many important works in literature, music, and the arts. Beginning after World War I and up until World War II, America saw writers like Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Sinclair Lewis, Dashiell Hammett, and Dorothy Parker emerge on the literary scene. Georgia O'Keeffe and Thomas Hart Benton were a few of the American artists who were productive during this period. Theaters on Broadway and other places were alive with new productions and Hollywood was grinding out new dramas and musicals every week. In December 1928 George Gershwin debuted his famous symphonic piece "An American in Paris." The Chicago Civic Opera building opened in 1929 with a 3500-seat auditorium. In popular music, 1929 was the year Guy Lombardo began his New Year's Eve radio broadcast. Song-writer Hoagy Carmichael wrote his famous "Stardust" in 1927, and "Georgia on My Mind" in 1930. America was alive with creativity. It was as if the economic downturn unleashed a volcano of creative energy that had not been seen in this country before—or since. This generation of young creative people has been called "The Lost Generation," for many of their contemporaries were killed during the Great War (World War I), which lasted from 1914 to 1918. The disillusionment inspired by the war led many creative artists to explore what it meant to be American in the modern world, and what it meant to be human.

Compare & Contrast

• 1929: Black and white relations in the South were stratified along racial lines. Education was officially segregated, with facilities for black and white children "separate but equal."

  Today: In the urban South, many African Americans, as elsewhere in the United States, have gained economic and professional status. Poor blacks everywhere in America are experiencing poverty and poor education at record low levels. Education is supposedly integrated, but neighborhood racial patterns have worked against equalizing education.

• 1929: While the family structure was beginning to disintegrate because of social changes in the country, most families had two parents and extended families living close together was common.

  Today: The two-parent "nuclear" family structure has been shattered by high rates of divorce and remarriage. A relatively high percentage of children in the United States live in single-parent families.

• 1929: Creativity in the arts was flourishing in the United States. Reading novels and short stories was a major form of entertainment. Only a few writers were financially successful.

  Today: Much of the literary creativity of Americans has become channeled into team efforts for television sitcoms and dramatic serials. The novel is still a significant form of recreation, but the film has superseded the novel as the primary form for written creative expression. A few novelists write best sellers which make lots of money, but writers for television and movies generally make more money than novelists or short storywriters.

• 1929: Illegitimate pregnancy among middle class women was a social disgrace that could lead to ostracization.

  Today: There is little stigma attached to unwed motherhood, at least for older women who are financially independent. Single women who want children become pregnant deliberately, either through artificial insemination or a relationship they do not wish to make permanent.

• 1929: Mental retardation was considered a curse and a burden that a family had to bear. Families felt ashamed and guilty when they had a retarded child.

  Today: The mentally impaired have many educational programs and opportunities to help them be productive and independent.

When Faulkner accepted the Nobel Prize in 1950, he made a speech that became a famous statement of the modern world and the artist's place in it. He spoke of the threat of physical destruction to the human spirit. What he expressed was the prevalent feeling of the Lost Generation that human beings had lost a sense of the meaning of life. In his speech, he expressed his belief that "man will not merely endure; he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of the past." Old values had been shattered by the events of the first half of the twentieth century. It was not yet apparent what the new values would be.

Critical Overview

Critical reaction to The Sound and the Fury was by no means universally favorable when it first appeared in print in 1929. While finding the novel powerful and sincere, Frances Lamont Robbins, writing in Outlook and Independent commented that "the theme, dramatic and potentially moving, loses much of its force and clarity by being presented, almost wholly, through subjective analysis. It takes a stronger hand than William Faulkner's to divert the stream of consciousness into channels of perfect usefulness and beauty." In the 1929 book On William Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury," however, Evelyn Scott congratulated the publishers for "presenting a little known writer with the dignity of recognition which his talent deserves." The critic called Faulkner's book "an important contribution to the permanent literature of fiction." "Hardly Worth While" was the title Clifton Fadiman used in his 1930 review in the Nation. The main problem with Faulkner's book, Fadiman felt, was that "the intelligent reader can grasp the newer literary anarchies only by an effort of analytical attention so strained that it fatigues and dulls his emotional perception." He did praise Faulkner for his portrayal of Benjy, but ridiculed it as too much of a good thing to listen to "one hundred pages of an imbecile's simplified sense perceptions and monosyllabic gibberings." Fadiman also thought Quentin and Jason were not interesting enough "to follow the ramifications of their minds and memories."

Since its publication, The Sound and the Fury has come to be recognized as one of Faulkner's masterpieces. As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses are his other heralded novels. Faulkner has long been considered a major American writer and many critics regard him as the most important American novelist of the twentieth century. Terry Heller, in a 1991 essay in the Critical Survey of Long Fiction, wrote that Faulkner "dramatizes in most of his novels some version of the central problem of modern man in the West," which he feels is an uncertainty about the meaning of human history. Linda W. Wagner compared Faulkner to Shakespeare, Dostoevski, Dickens, Milton, and Dante for his moral point of view. Her 1981 essay in the Dictionary of Literary Biography commends the author for his inventiveness and vigor. "Faulkner faces the problematic existence of the modern world, and he insists that human beings can surmount those problems," she remarks.

The strongest praise for The Sound and the Fury centers around its moral message. In "Worlds in Counterpoint," Olga W. Vickery's 1964 essay, the critic praises Faulkner for his structure, themes, and characterizations. "Out of Dilsey's actions and her participation in the Easter service arise once more the simple verities of human life," writes Vickery. "The splinters of truth presented in the first three sections reverberate.… [Out] of those same events … come Dilsey's triumph and her peace, lending significance … to the book as a whole," Vickery concludes. "The Sound and the Fury is a moral book," comments Robert J. Griffin in his 1963 essay in Essays in Modern American Literature. He continues: "Integral to its structure is the depiction of four distinct ethical points of view.… The novel is definitely a moral book, and ultimately a sort of religious book," Griffin contends. Arthur Mizener called the portrayal of Jason Compson, "Faulkner's finest portrait of a poor white." Continuing in his 1967 essay in Twelve Great American Novels, Mizener echoes other critics in his assessment of the novel for being "in a quiet way quite unlike the melodramatic religiosity of much twentieth-century literature." It "is a religious book," asserts Mizener. After Faulkner received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, he emerged from a period of obscurity. The Nobel Prize was the first of many other awards and his reputation grew steadily after receiving it. His books have been translated in many other languages. Few writers since William Shakespeare have had so much written about them.

Criticism

Jeffrey M. Lilburn

In the following essay, Lilburn, a teaching assistant at the University of Western Ontario, analyzeshow each of the novel's narrations comes to focus on Caddy Compson. He notes that while a reader of The Sound and the Fury can only learn of Caddy through the observations of her family, interpreting her character is central to understanding the novel.

William Faulkner's fourth novel, The Sound and the Fury is a haunting and sometimes bewildering novel that surprises and absorbs the reader each time it is read. The novel was Faulkner's personal favorite and, along with James Joyce's novel Ulysses and T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land, is generally thought to be one of the greatest works of literature in English of the twentieth century. The Sound and the Fury also signalled the beginning of the "major period" of Faulkner's own literary creativity; four of the five novels that followed—As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!—are, along with The Sound and the Fury, often regarded as the best in Faulkner's oeuvre. Not surprisingly, the novel has received an extraordinary amount of critical analysis, much of which has been devoted to explaining Faulkner's technical experimentations. Critics have also widely discussed Faulkner's treatment of issues such as race, suicide, incest, time, history, and religion. Central to any reading of the novel, however, is the character that Faulkner claimed was his source for the novel—Caddy. Richard Gray has described Caddy as the novel's "absent presence" and each of the four sections as "another attempt to know her." But to the reader, Caddy remains an elusive mystery whose enforced silence prevents her from ever being known. To her three brothers, she is a source of obsession and irritation that cannot be forgotten or overcome.

The Sound and the Fury explores the break-down of the familial relationships that lead to the Compson family's tragic deterioration. Few readers would disagree that the family's demise is indeed tragic, but the precise reasons for the downfall are still debated. David Dowling has suggested that the tragedy of the Compsons is that they are slaves to themselves and to the past. This argument is particularly relevant to the novel's first two sections. Benjy's monologue, for example, is uttered in the present—Easter weekend, 1928—but is mainly comprised of memories from his childhood and adolescence. Most of these memories are connected to his sister, Caddy, whose departure following her marriage to Herbert Head leaves a void in Benjy's life. Because Caddy was the one family member to provide Benjy with the nurturing love that he needed, and because, as Margaret Bauer observes, Mrs. Compson does little else but whine about being punished by God for her family's transgressions, Caddy was more of a mother figure to Benjy than Mrs. Compson was. Through his monologue, which often obscures the boundaries between present and past, Benjy reveals both a deep-seated attachment to a past inhabited by Caddy and a desperate yearning for her return. Like his companion, Luster, who is busy searching for a lost quarter, Benjy, too, hopes to find that which he has lost.

What Do I Read Next?

• A tale of incest in the Sutpen family set in the South, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936) features Quentin Compson as a character.
• Truman Capote's 1948 novel Other Voices, Other Rooms is the story of alienated youth set in the author's usual Southern Gothic atmosphere.
• Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer Prize-winning romantic novel Gone with the Wind, published in 1936, depicts the destruction of Southern culture during the Civil War.
• Robert Penn Warren's 1946 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the King's Men portrays a charismatic Southern politician who has been compared to the real politician Huey Long.
• Both of Tennessee Williams' Pulitzer Prize-winning plays Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) depict the sexual frustration of his characters in the context of Southern society.

As many critics have noted, Benjy's memories are largely concerned with Caddy's sexuality. His disapproving cries after catching Caddy and Charlie on the swing provide merely one example of his preoccupation with his sister's sexual awakening. It is in the second section, however, that Caddy's sexuality emerges as the central issue of the novel. Quentin is totally obsessed by the subject and, throughout the morning, afternoon, and evening of June 2, 1910, can think of little else. His relationship with his sister is anticipated by the childhood scene at the branch where Caddy, ignoring Quentin's protests, removes her dress in front of her brothers and Versh. Quentin slaps Caddy, who then falls on her behind and muddies her drawers. This highly symbolic scene prefigures Caddy's future as a so-called "fallen woman" and shows Quentin's futile attempts to protect his sister's honor and body. Some readers also believe that the scene suggests Quentin's implication in his sister's later promiscuity, as well as his own incestuous feelings towards her.

When Caddy reaches sexual maturity, Quentin is still trying to protect her but his attempts are always unsuccessful. Just as he fails to prevent Caddy from taking off her dress at the branch, so he fails later in life when confronting Caddy's lover, Dalton Ames. His final defeat occurs on the afternoon of June 2, 1910, as he is driving with Mrs. Bland and some friends from school. One of his friends, Gerald Bland, begins "blowing off' about his many women and Quentin, who has just been thinking about the humiliating incident with Caddy's lover, automatically repeats the same question he had asked Dalton: "Did you ever have a sister?" Ironically, the beating Quentin then receives from Gerald occurs just moments after Quentin was himself accused of kidnapping a little girl. The girl's brother, Julio, threatens to kill Quentin, thereby reproducing—and mocking—Quentin's threats against Dalton.

Like Benjy, Quentin is determined to maintain—or rather recapture—some elusive ideal that, in childhood, seemed genuine and permanent. His need to protect his sister stems from an anachronistic sense of honor that derives from what Richard Gray describes as "an authoritative discourse issuing out of some epic past." That discourse, Gray explains, is based on notions of gentility traditionally attached to Southern plantation aristocracy and gives Quentin "an instinctive sense of how life should be." But unfortunately, Quentin's notions of how life should be do not, David Dowling argues, allow women any space between saint and sinner. As Diane Roberts explains, in the South, ideologies were based on hierarchies or oppositions; as a result, a person is defined not by what he or she is, but by what he or she is not. Mrs. Compson, for example, has a very rigid idea of what it means to be a lady: "I was taught that there is no halfway ground that a woman is either a lady or not." In her eyes, Caddy occupies the second half of the virgin/whore pairing and is incontrovertibly a "fallen woman."

Quentin's section has been described as a dialogue, or debate, in which he struggles to determine the validity of these notions of honor and Southern ladyhood. As he wanders through the final day before his suicide, Quentin finds himself caught between his beliefs and the surfacing realization that his beliefs have no foundation. His main problem, Dowling and others have argued, is that he cannot bring himself to accept changes in meaning. He tries to come to terms with his sister's unconventional behavior and marriage to Herbert but the thought, suggested to him by his father, that someday his despair "will no longer hurt [him] like this now" is intolerable to him. To acknowledge such a change would mean that even Caddy "was not quite worth despair." It would mean that the "authoritative discourse" he clings to is not only outdated, but that it was never more than one fiction among many others. His suicide thus becomes symbolic of both his inability to accept the fluctuating nature of meaning and, as Kevin Railey shows, of the futility of attempting to "assert the power of a displaced class and its fading values" in the South of the twentieth century.

The third section marks a drastic shift in the novel. Whereas Quentin struggles with his inability to renounce the anachronistic values discussed above, and wishes he could maintain the relationship he and Caddy had as children, Jason feels only contempt for his family and his past. He does not mourn Caddy's absence like Benjy does; instead, Jason's thoughts of the past are accompanied by feelings of resentment and rage. The only loss he mourns is that of the job he was promised at Herbert's bank. Jason's pettiness is evident throughout his monologue, but the grudge he bears over this one lost opportunity is unparalleled. He believes that Caddy's promiscuity deprived him of the job because Herbert would not have left her had her daughter, also named Quentin, not been born too early. As a result, he views his niece Quentin as the symbol and joint cause of his present misery and acts out his revenge on Caddy through her. Not coincidentally, Quentin is now about the same age Caddy was at the time of her pregnancy, and Jason's brutal treatment of his niece may have as much to do with her own promiscuity as it does with his desire for revenge.

It is evident that Jason enjoys tormenting his niece and will go well out of his way to do so. He spends much of the Easter weekend attempting to foil Quentin's rendezvous with a man from the show and often appears preoccupied by what his niece is wearing. Diane Roberts has argued that this excessive attention paid to the young girl's body and boyfriend suggests "barely concealed desire." She even describes Jason's treatment of Quentin as "sadistic eroticism." Jason's own words appear to support this interpretation. When his mother, attempting to foster kindness towards her grand-daughter, reminds Jason that the girl is his "own flesh and blood," his response suggests that his brother Quentin may not have been the only family member to harbor incestuous desires: 'That's just what I was thinking of—flesh. And a little blood too, if I had my way." Whether or not Jason's desire for revenge is mingled with a sexual desire for his niece's body shall be left for the reader to decide. What is now finally clear, however, is that the Compson brothers' obsessive pre-occupations with female sexuality play a significant role in the family's downfall. Benjy's disapproving cries and Quentin's psychological turmoil have become open hostility in Jason. His cruel treatment of both Caddy and her daughter in the final two sections provides what is perhaps the best view of the destructive forces operating within the Compson household.

The final section of the novel is often referred to as the "Dilsey section." But while Dilsey is one of the main characters of this section, her story, like Caddy's, is told for her, not by her. Also, much of this section is again devoted to Jason and his mad pursuit of his niece and her money. The result is a jarring contrast between Dilsey's epiphany-like experience at the Easter service and Jason's frustrating failure in Mottson. Richard Gray has noted how, in this section, Jason's pride, rage and isolation are countered by Dilsey and the Easter Day congregation' s collective voice and "feelings of spiritual consummation." Other critics, however, have suggested that Dilsey's repeated refrain following the Reverend Shegog's moving sermon refers to the end of the Compson family. "I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin," she says, seemingly foreseeing the Compsons' final downfall.

Yet, the exact fate of the Compson family remains unknown at the novel's end. After turning the final page, readers may find themselves looking for something that isn't there: the conspicuously absent "Caddy Section." Although Faulkner did offer some additional information in the Compson Appendix that he wrote to accompany the publication of The Portable Faulkner in 1946, the fact remains that Caddy's voice is never heard. Why is Caddy the only Compson sibling who is not given the opportunity to express her own story? Roberts reports that Faulkner thought Caddy "too beautiful and too moving to reduce her to telling what was going on" and felt it would be "more passionate" to represent her through the voices of others. Another explanation might be found by returning to the scene that inspired the novel. When a young Caddy climbed the pear tree to look into the parlor window, she demonstrated courage, adventurousness, and a willingness to defy authority. Her male onlookers, meanwhile, could merely stand below and watch the muddy seat of her drawers. Is it a coincidence then that, in this novel, Caddy remains imprisoned within the narratives of three brothers whose obsessions and preoccupations reveal that, in a sense, they are all still fixated on those muddy drawers? Certainly, Caddy's unchosen silence signifies more than the desire to make her seem "more passionate."

Source: Jeffrey M. Lilburn, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1998.

Philip Dubuisson Castille

In the following excerpt, Castille argues that the character of Dilsey is more developed than many critics have seen her. He interprets her actions after hearing the Reverend Shegog's sermon as leading her away from the Compsons and back to her family, a change that reflects the Christian idea of redemption.

The main action of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury occurs during Easter Week, 1928. Because Easter is the holiest event in the Christian calendar, and because the Passion Week serves as the book's main organizing device, many readers have sensed the presence of religious themes in this often opaque work. But over the past five decades, critical interpretations have ranged from Christian spirituality to existential nothingness. While there has been no consensus on the meaning of the novel, Faulkner scholars have agreed over the years that the structure of The Sound and the Fury follows the Modernist "mythical method." Much as the Odyssey gives form and sequence to Joyce's Ulysses, episodes and images from the Christian Holy Week provide an external framework to Faulkner's narrative. Members of the Compson family undergo experiences which rehearse episodes from the last days of Jesus's life. The four sections of the novel form four Compson gospels, which like the biblical originals develop and expand the story they retell. These parallels to the gospel tradition are most insistent during the Sunday church service in the fourth section of The Sound and the Fury. By means of his powerful if unorthodox rendition of the Passion narrative, the Reverend Shegog wakens in Dilsey capacities for spiritual renewal. Her visionary Easter experience then rouses her to secular acts of rejection and affirmation.

Dilsey Gibson, the kindly and long-suffering domestic worker at the Compson place, is the major non-Compson character in The Sound and the Fury. A long-standing scholarly interpretation is that Dilsey represents a moral norm in the decadent Compson world and her actions set a standard of humane behavior. Opposing such a "religious" reading of the novel is the nihilistic view, in which Dilsey's Christianity is meaningless or irrelevant. Both approaches tend to regard Dilsey, whether noble or absurd, as static. Few critics of The Sound and the Fury see her as a developing character, although some describe her at the end of the novel as more devoted to the Compsons. My view is that the novel's fourth section, as well as the "Appendix: Compson," suggests the opposite—that she turns away from the Compsons after the Easter Sunday service. Her conversion is religious in that the Reverend Shegog's sermon revitalizes her faith in the Christian God. Yet her Easter experience also has practical consequences. Her life changes as she begins to distance herself from the Compsons and to reaffirm her membership in her African-American family.

Although she appears in the novel's first three sections, Dilsey figures most importantly in the fourth chapter—so much so that it is frequently called "Dilsey's section." She wakes to a cold, gray dawn on Sunday and works to warm the tomblike Compson house. It is worth noting that Easter means nothing to the Compsons (although Dilsey leads the retardate Benjy Compson uncomprehending to Sunday service). Her morning chores done, she makes the long walk to church. Dilsey, her daughter Frony, and her grandson Luster follow the wet streets of Jefferson, Mississippi, until the pavement runs out. Then they step down a dirt road to "a weathered church" outside town, where a revivalist minister from St. Louis preaches the Easter sermon. At first they are disappointed with the "shabby" little traveling minister, with his "monkey face" and "monkey body." But when his voice glides from the "level and cold" inflections of a white man into African-American intonations, they respond warmly.

However, the Reverend Shegog's use of Black English to stir his Mississippi congregation apparently has led some readers to underestimate him as a thinker. His Easter sermon is an acknowledged masterpiece of style and showmanship, but it is also impressive for its artistic skill and intellectual understanding of the Christ story. The Reverend Shegog reveals himself in Faulkner's text to be a learned man whose unconventional exegesis combines material from Christian, Hebraic, and Near Eastern sources to reconstruct the Passion narrative. By advancing a renovating vision of the power of life over death, his homily prompts Dilsey to break free from the Compsons and to renounce her years of resignation and denial.

The Reverend Shegog's sermon is based on the Christian concept of divine love, the mainspring for the redemption of humankind. But at the same time it insists that God's grace and forgiveness are not boundless. When the Last Judgment comes, the Almighty sternly warns, " 'I aint gwine load down heaven!'" God's mercy and the granting of salvation are presented as inherently limited and conditional. This sermon depicts an angry God who denounces those who reject goodness and deny His love. In effect He says, you have murdered my innocent Son; for that, you will be destroyed. God the Father in heaven looks down on the cross on Calvary and cries in fury, " 'dey done kilt Jesus; dey done kilt my Son!" In punishment for the crucifixion, God drowns the world. "O blind sinner! Breddren, I tells you; sistuhn, I says to you, when de Lawd did turn His mighty face, say, Aint gwine overload heaven! I can see de widowed God shet His do'; I sees de whelmin flood roll between; I sees de darkness en de death everlastin upon de generations."

As many commentators have shown, and as he insisted, Faulkner knew the Scriptures well; his fiction includes many biblical parallels as well as Christ and Adam figures, such as Joe Christmas or Isaac McCaslin. In The Sound and the Fury the Reverend Shegog does not merely repeat the well-known events of the Easter story. Instead, he refashions the details of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus to develop a mythological pattern consistent with the Passion narrative.

The most significant of these scriptural re-arrangements occurs when the Reverend Shegog places the destruction of the world by water after the crucifixion of Christ. When Jesus dies on Calvary, His Father sends down global ruin in the form of a flood, an audacious reworking of the Noah-flood story from Hebrew Scripture. Then, amid total devastation caused by the scourging waters, there arises the promise of renewal in the figure of the risen Christ. The millennium arrives all of a sudden at the darkest hour:

"Den, lo! Breddren! Yes, breddren! Whut I see? Whut I see, O sinner? I sees de resurrection en de light; sees de meek Jesus saying Dey kilt Me dat ye shall live again; I died dat dem whut sees en believes shall never die. Breddren, O breddren! I sees de doom crack en hears de golden horns shoutin down de glory, en de arisen dead whut got de blood and de ricklickshun of de Lamb!"

In a dramatic departure from creedal orthodoxy, the Reverend Shegog's sermon abruptly asserts the power of life (the resurrection of Jesus) precisely at the moment when the power of death seems all-engulfing (the destruction of the world by flood after the crucifixion). While this account revises the orthodox Passion narrative, it has a mythic or poetic logic which recalls the classical literary form of the elegy. In "a rebound as sudden as that in 'Lycidas,' [the Reverend Shegog] makes the typical elegiac turn from universal despair to universal comfort and joy" [according to Richard P. Adams in Faulkner: Myth and Motion]. This ancient pre-Christian parabola of death and resurrection gives the Reverend Shegog's sermon its formal structure: borrowing from elegiac tradition, the Reverend Shegog alternates death images (such as the total darkness caused by the flood) with rebirth images (such as the breaking dawn heralded by the resurrected Jesus).

In addition to form, his resounding sermon recalls pre-Christian religious ritual and belief, which Faulkner had studied in the twenties.… In The Golden Bough [James] Frazer documents that the Christian Easter story is not unique in world religion. Instead, it draws upon the widespread Near Eastern springtime practice of worshipping "dying and reviving gods," from which the elegiac poetic tradition springs.…

My point is that Frazer's theory of mythology and his comparative approach to religion seem to inform Faulkner's technique in section four of The Sound and the Fury. In the Reverend Shegog's sermon, Faulkner employs the idiomatic language of twentieth-century Southern Afro-Christianity, which he knew first-hand, to dramatize anew the ancient mystery of springtime resurrection, which he read about in Frazer.

Consistent with nature cult imagery, the Reverend Shegog's sermon portrays the Holy Land before the redemption as a dark estate, steeped in misery. The suffering falls hardest on mothers and children. The Reverend Shegog depicts a terrified Mary as she tries to shield her baby Jesus from the Roman death squads: "'Mary jump up, sees de sojer face: We gwine to kill! We gwine to kill! We gwine to kill yo little Jesus!'" Under the nightmare of oppression and deprivation, the country groans with "'de weepin en de lamentation" as "'de long, cold years rolls away!"' Then the scene shifts to the evil hour on Calvary. The mourning women keen their "'evening lamentations"' as the apocalyptic darkness falls and the world sinks beneath the all-destroying flood. But when Jesus rises from the grave on Easter, golden comets on high sound a new anthem of victory and freedom to mark His glorious return to the regenerated earth.

The Reverend Shegog's revisions to the Passion story serve to strengthen its message that God's life-giving love can redeem the past from apparently total defeat. Amid circumstances of overwhelming desolation, the redemptive force of His grace remains a present reality. The pattern of death and rebirth which shapes his rendition of the resurrection implies the immediate possibility of self-transcendence. "'I sees it, breddren! I sees hit. Sees de blastin, blindin sight,"' shouts the Reverend Shegog. His verbs are all in the present tense, signifying that the past is transfigured and time begins again. Existence is no longer a curse or affliction but a means of revelation and transformation.…

In The Sound and the Fury [Faulkner] brings his "Passion Week of the heart" metaphor to fulfillnent in the Easter service. According to the Reverend Shegog's sermon, the evil past can be immediately redeemed and all things made new again under the auspices of the resurrection of Jesus. That is, the mystery of rebirth calls upon us personally to rise up from deep hurt and hopelessness and to start over. But for those who lack vision in spring, who shut their eyes and harden their hearts, no salvation is possible.

The Reverend Shegog's jarring retelling of the Passion narrative, with its double emphasis on the power and the limits of love, leaves Dilsey profoundly moved. As light falls through the "dingy windows" of the church, she sits bolt upright, awed by a great sense of discovery, and cries unashamedly. There is no evidence that anyone else is deeply affected by the homily, although it is well received by the congregation. Frony is embarrassed by her mother's open emotionalism; she has not herself been touched. "'Whyn't you quit dat, mammy?"' she hisses, "'Wid all dese people lookin.'" Luster is plainly unmoved. As the crowd drifts away, nothing in the text suggests that Dilsey's spiritual awakening is shared. The churchgoers chat "easily again group to group" on their way home, much as they did before the service. But Dilsey, silent and weeping, has been granted an epiphany. Suddenly, winter has ended. The morning clouds part under "the bright noon" as she proclaims to Frony, "'I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin,"' with emphasis on the word now. According to the theologian Gabriel Vahanian [in Wait without Idols, 1964], Dilsey seems to mean that "the fullness of time is a possibility even within time. Eternity does not 'begin' after time; it happens within time. The resurrection does not take place after one's physical death; it is the only experience by which here and now the human reality can be transfigured, by which man can become that which he is not; it is the possibility of authentic existence."

The consequences of Dilsey's Easter conversion occur in distinct phases. In the first phase Dilsey gives up her long and fruitless effort to "save" the Compsons from themselves. Through her participation in the death and rebirth cycle traced by the Reverend Shegog, she is able to lay her past bare and see it truly. She perceives that the thankless devotion she has given the Compsons has been wasted because no love can reach them. She comes to understand that the Compsons are beyond salvation, beyond even help, because God has turned "'His mighty face'" and "'shet His do'" to them for their cruelty and hatred.

Charged with this revelation, Dilsey immediately evidences a new attitude and purpose. As she and her companions walk home from the church, Dilsey chides her grandson, "'You tend to your business en let de white folks tend to deir'n.'" This reflects a sharp alteration from her previous concern about Compson matters and her long struggle to bind them together. When Luster tries to pique her curiosity with hints of Miss Quentin's intrigues, Dilsey shows no interest; she no longer wants to know about Miss Quentin. Nor does she care to try further to protect Miss Quentin from her Uncle Jason or her grandmother. With the past at her back, she approaches the Compson place and looks at "the square, paintless house with its rotting portico," the first time in the novel that the house takes on a detailed, objective reality. This description suggests that, like the crumbling mansion they in-habit, the Compsons are beyond renovation, and Dilsey now knows it. As a result of the Reverend Shegog's sermon, she foresees the end of the Compson line.

Although at basis Dilsey's act is a renunciation, it includes an important affirmation. Years earlier her husband Roskus had warned her that nothing but bad fortune would come from remaining on the Compson place. But she had ignored him and pursued the illusion of preserving the Compsons as a family by lavishing them with her compassion. In the second phase of Dilsey's Easter conversion, she realizes that her years of service to the Compsons have drawn her away from Roskus and her children. She gains a new perspective on her own family and moves toward reunion with them.

Dilsey eventually will leave Mississippi to reassume her matriarchal role in the Gibson family. This breakthrough apparently occurs in 1933, when Jason sells the moldering Compson house and is "able to free himself forever … from the Negro woman." The dispersal of the Compsons—anticipated by Miss Quentin's departure on Easter Sunday, 1928—is now complete: Mrs. Compson is dead, Benjy is in an asylum, and Jason is a "childless bachelor" whose twisted sexual urges are gratified only by prostitutes. Dilsey calls upon Frony, who has moved to St. Louis with her husband, a railroad porter. Frony goes "back to Memphis to make a home for her mother since Dilsey refused to go further than that." Averting the doom of the Compsons, Dilsey renews her lapsed family ties and puts the barren past behind her.…

In summary, before Dilsey participates in the 1928 Easter service, she shares the doom of the Compsons. But the Reverend Shegog's sermon reinvigorates her belief in redemption. After hearing him preach, she attains a transforming vision, one which has spiritual as well as secular consequences. Her hope for salvation is rekindled as she is reminded that the Passion of Jesus is an immanent reality. In temporal terms, her "'ricklickshun of de Lamb'" leads her to remember that despite everything, the future still lies open before her. She undergoes a conversion which allows her to break free from the morbid past represented by the Compsons. She perceives that they are a dying family in a rotting house, and that her integrity as a woman, wife, and mother has been undermined by her useless devotion to them. Like the fed-up God of the Reverend Shegog's sermon, she resolves to leave them to the extinction that awaits. In time she redirects her life toward reunion with her own family.

However, as Cleanth Brooks cautioned nearly thirty years ago [in William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country, 1963] Faulkner makes no claim in The Sound and the Fury for Christianity, "one way or the other." Faulkner's religious beliefs, particularly in the early phase of his career, remain ambiguous. When Faulkner uses Christian imagery and narrative, they are organizational devices; they are not devotional. He always subjects religion or mythology to his artistic purposes. He does not relinquish control to the legends or their authority.

My feeling is that The Sound and the Fury uses its persistent Christian analogues not to evangelize but to stir the human need for hope and renewal. From Frazer, Faulkner found that he could appropriate the lore of Christianity without endorsing its creed. The Reverend Shegog's Easter sermon in section four of the novel sounds a triumphant note of affirmation which draws upon Christian doctrine without submitting to it. His homily, delivered to Dilsey and the reader, draws us by means of its unorthodox rendition of the Easter story into a symbolic recapitulation of the death-and-rebirth pattern. Using the comparative methodology of The Golden Bough, Faulkner has the Reverend Shegog revise the Christian Passion by fusing several ancient religious traditions. This technique universalizes the message of his sermon and emphasizes that the human longing for salvation is not contained by any single doctrine or tradition. As Frazer stressed, all springtime ceremonies on behalf of dead and risen deities are periodic efforts to restore a necessary faith in the future.

Christianity served Faulkner's artistic needs by providing him with a formal tradition to shape Dilsey's conversion experience. By means of his "Passion Week of the heart" metaphor, he sought to convey the message that redemption means being vulnerable to the saving moment, when time falls away and life starts again. Like Christ and many other dying and reviving deities—as well as their celebrants—Dilsey is reborn in spring. Christianity, as a religion of incarnation which stresses the transforming presence of the divine in the human, provides the specific context for Dilsey's deliverance. Her Easter conversion miraculously elevates her to an incommunicable vision of heavenly salvation. But it also leads her to forge a new secular identity independent of the Compsons and to recover an enduring family heritage of her own.

Source: Philip Dubuisson Castille, "Dilsey's Easter Conversion in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 24, No. 4, winter, 1992, pp. 423-33.

John L. Longley Jr.

In the following excerpt, Longley states that the novel is about "the death of a family and the corresponding decay of a society," and explores how the character of Caddy is central to the actions of all three of her brothers.

The subject-matter [of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury] is the death of a family and the corresponding decay of a society. More narrowly, the novel is about the various Compson's—parents and children, brothers and sisters—and how they are able or not able to love each other, and how the failure of love destroys them all. The central focus is the beautiful and doomed Candace Compson. We never see her full-face or hear her speak in her own persona. She lives for us only in the tortured and highly subjective recollection of her three brothers: Benjy, the congenital idiot; Quentin, the moral abstractionist and suicide; Jason, the sociopath who lives only for money ("who to me represented pure evil. He's the most vicious character in my opinion I ever thought of.") These recollections form the first three sections of the novel. They are followed by Section Four, describing the events of Easter Sunday, 1928. This part belongs mainly to Dilsey, but is told from an outside, third-person point of view, magnificently distanced and controlled.…

If the dominant theme of the novel is love—love between members of the family, and how they are able or not able to give that love freely—then the accidents of time and place [of the setting] fade in importance. The evil that the Compson children experience is conventional enough. Much of it is not evil at all, but simply the heartbreak of loss of innocence and the inevitable corruption that comes with growing up. There are evil characters in the book—Jason, certainly. But there are others who are merely weak, irresponsible, and self-serving, like the whining hypochondriac Caroline Compson and her brother Maury. Most of these people, whatever their pretentions, are examples of love defective or love perverted. Only three persons in the novel are able to give pure, whole-hearted, unselfish love: Caddy, Mr. Compson, and of course Dilsey. There are many scenes of love and affection between the children and their father, and with each other when they were younger.…

Caddy's tragedy is that she will never find anyone commensurate with her own capacity to love: not father, mother, brothers or lover. Again, it is her misfortune to be born in the wrong age. The general moral climate of rural, southern, Victorian America—a religious atmosphere of morbid Calvinism gone decadent—can view Caddy's tentative sexual experience only as the ultimate horror. She has loved her father as a child and as a young woman. She has defended Benjy from Jason, and treats him always as if he were no different from other children. She is especially close to Quentin in childhood and adolescence, until his morbid obsession with her chastity drives them apart.

At the point in her life when she is old enough to turn away from father and brother, and begin courtship, she finds she has nowhere to turn. There is literally no one to help her, certainly not among the jellybeans and town squirts of her adolescence. When she meets a man in Dalton Ames, she does not know how to resist him. Ames is the ultimate macho: handsome, powerful, violent, and totally amoral. When Quentin confronts him, and orders him to leave town, Ames is able to subdue him literally with one hand.

Foreshadowing the fate of her daughter, Caddy is driven to nymphomania by the hysterical posturings of her mother and the increasing pressure from Quentin. When Caddy was about fourteen, she was caught kissing a town boy. For three days Caroline Compson walks around the house wearing a black veil and declaring her daughter is dead. She attempts to spy on Caddy's movements, until Mr. Compson forbids it.

Already pregnant, Caddy accompanies her mother to the spa at French Lick. She returns, engaged to marry Herbert Head. One may only imagine the emotional process she has gone through; the forces that have pushed her into marriage with someone like Head, a man who has been expelled from Harvard for cheating at cards and on examinations. He is vulgar, loud, and falsely hearty. On Caddy's wedding day, T. P. finds the champagne for the reception stored in the basement, begins drinking it and giving it to Benjy. Benjy begins to bellow, and the result is pandemonium.

When Head discovers Caddy is pregnant, he divorces her. When her daughter is born, Caddy names her Quentin, for the brother who is now dead by his own hand. Mrs. Compson agrees that the family will take the child and raise it. With the weight of community mores heavily on her side, together with her own hysterics, she is able to impose these conditions: 1) Caddy shall never enter the house again; 2) never see her child again; 3) her name shall never be mentioned to the child.

Occasionally, Mr. Compson will violate this heartless pact by letting Caddy into the house to see her baby. After he is dead, Jason is the remaining competent male Compson, and he enforces the pact even more brutally, including the episode of the hundred dollars and the momentary look at the baby. After Quentin reaches adolescence, takes Jason's accumulated money, and runs away with the showman, Caddy's last viable link with the Compson house is gone. We have one more glimpse of her in a picture magazine, as the mistress of a Nazi Stabsgeneral. The librarian believes the woman in the picture is Caddy; Jason does not. Dilsey will not say. Perhaps it is; perhaps not.

This, in brief, is the life of Candace Compson. Whatever else, that life is the central definitive presence in the lives of her brothers. She is an obsession with each of them, but in different ways.…

Benjy loved three things: firelight, his sister Caddy, and the pasture that was sold to pay for Quentin's year at Harvard and Caddy's fancy wedding. His mental retardation is severe; he cannot speak at all. Yet, he is sensitive to color, light and dark, heat and cold, and above all, smells. He has emotions, and responds to the slightest shift in what he is used to. He hates and fears change, and bellows with outrage and terror at any upset in his routines. He whimpers when he is unhappy. Chronology is beyond him; he cannot distinguish then from now. All time is the same to him; a sort of continuous present in which he does not know his memories are only memories. Thus he cannot "… remember his sister but only the loss of her, and firelight was the same bright shape as going to sleep, and the pasture was even better sold than before because now he and TP could not only follow timeless along the fence the motions which it did not even matter to him were human beings swinging golfsticks."

Dilsey takes care of him, and Caddy is his champion and defender when they are little. It is to Caddy and only Caddy that he looks for emotional support ("You're not a poor baby. Are you"). He relies on her to bring him the physical objects that have a quieting effect on him—the paper dolls and the box of tinsel stars. As Caddy grows up, many things become disturbing to Benjy: her interest in boys, her use of perfume, the change to long dresses.…

[Eventually] Caddy goes away on her honeymoon. From here on, Benjy will not have a sister; only the loss of her to remember. What can we say of him; his child-like nature, his man's body, and his eyes empty and blue and serene? Benjy is, as Ratlift once said of another unfortunate, "… something that don't want nothing but to walk and feel the sun and wouldn't know how to hurt no man even if it would and wouldn't want to even if it could …" Perhaps we could leave him at that, except for the powerful and violent last scene of the novel.…

Quentin is clearly the most intelligent of the Compson children. He is thoughtful and sensitive. His segment of the novel is a cri du coeur uttered silently on the last day of his life. We go with him that day, following his apparently aimless actions, witnessing the obsessive, fugue-like images and sets of words which he repeats over and over again. We watch as he buys and then conceals the flatirons he will use to weight his body when he drowns himself. He is twenty years old and has his life before him. What has brought him to this pass?

The answer is clear but not simple. He ends his life because of what life has done to him. The world cannot be changed into what he wants it to be. He cannot change Caddy back into what she was. He is sure he cannot live knowing what he knows; his father tells him he will, and he will not risk that. [T]hats it if people could only change one another forever that way merge like a flame swirling up for an instant then blow cleanly out along the cool eternal dark.…

Surely; surely the main thrust of [Mr. Compson's] words is to show his son that his anguish can be endured, that the pain will lessen, that he can go on, and even make something of his life. Just as surely, the advice does not have its desired effect. Quite clearly, Quentin kills himself not because he cannot stand his agony, but because he too believes it will grow less and will someday fade away.

"Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say." Jason is speaking of his niece, but it could very easily be his sister. In the way his hatred functions, he does not always clearly distinguish between the two of them. As noted earlier, Benjy and Quentin love Caddy, however twisted and self-seeking that love may be. Jason's one great sustaining passion is "… immortal hatred and study of revenge."

In the Compson Appendix, Mr. Faulkner calls Jason the first sane Compson since Culloden; "… rational contained and even a philosopher in the old stoic tradition." All the human race are Compsons; that is, predictable if essentially inexplicable, hence not to be trusted. The rest of humanity operates on the basis of emotion (pity, love, generosity, pride) which is why they are insane and Jason is not. This is the cream of the jest, because the central defining obsession in everything Jason does is the job promised to him by Herbert Head. If Jason were one-third the businessman he thinks he is, or were at all capable of rational, objective assessment, he could see what impulsive, irrational people (like you and me, or Quentin Compson) know at one glance: Herbert Head is a tinhorn blowhard, a liar, and a cheat. How good is his promise? Who knows where his money comes from? Yet this is precisely the point. The "lost job" is Jason's crutch, his security blanket, his justification for every sadistic, criminal thing he does. I reckon you'll know now that you cant beat me out of a job and get away with it he says, after he has taken Caddy's hundred dollars to let her see the baby "just for a minute." The bitch that cost me a job, the one chance I ever had to get ahead he says to the sheriff, describing his niece.…

Jason embodies the instinctive, irrational love of self; the monstrous, incestuous self-concern that leaves no room for love of others. Since we dare not admit the fear of imperfection in the self that is loved, we seek out and punish others in retaliation for any frustration or thwarting that the self encounters. Jason is paranoid and sees the world with a paranoid's logical consistency. He sees himself as a long-suffering, put-upon man, doomed to live as the only sane human in a world of irrational, incompetent fools. It seems clear that Jason does not recognize the ultimate motivation of his actions, how they grow out of his crippling inadequacy of the soul, his total inability to love.

Jason's most complex, most sensuous wound is his relation to his niece, Quentin. She is for him both the outward visible proof of Caddy's shame and the living reminder of the lost job. Thus she is both the constant focus of his hatred and the most gratifying target for his cruelty and retaliation. Probably, he does not himself realize the source of his constant neurotic anxiety over Quentin's chastity or what he is sure is the lack of it. In the monologues of his incessant inner fantasies, he can at the same time believe she is beyond redemption and still complain of the effort he is making to save her. He can assert that he does not care what she does, even when running up and down back alleys to spy on her.…

Jason's day of reckoning dawns on Easter Sunday. He is sitting at breakfast, savoring his latest theft and anticipating the entire day in which to torment his family. He has begun on the topic of the broken window in his bedroom, not yet realizing its significance. He begins the ritual of refusing to eat until Quentin is up at the table. Only when he realizes that Quentin is not in her room does the edge of an apprehension, too terrible to be thought of, intrude itself. "… he stood … as if he were listening to something much further away.… His attitude was that of one who goes through the motions of listening in order to deceive himself."…

The great sensuous wound of Jason's complex relaxation to his niece is far too precious to relinquish. He still wishes, hopes, wants to believe that he will be able to slip stealthily up to Quentin and the man with the red tie, beat them both severely, and regain every cent of the money. He is not yet ready to accept what his common sense might have told him long before. The agonizing headache that strikes him at this point does not deter him. Still full of the fictitious role he has constructed for himself, he roughs up the elderly carnival cook, who retaliates by almost splitting Jason's head with a hatchet. Rescued by the carnival owner, Jason sits in his car, blind with pain, haggling futilely with a series of Negro youths to drive him back to Jefferson. People who pass in their Easter clothes look at him, "the man sitting quietly behind the wheel of a small car, with his invisible life raveled out about him like a worn-out sock." Eventually he pays the price one of the youths is asking.

In the middle of these sordid events is the Easter service in the Negro church. It rests like a jewel in the setting of Jason's insane pursuit, Mrs. Compson's vindictive whining, the needless tormenting Dilsey is put through. Everything contrasts: all this shabby and futile materialism against the impassioned and beautiful promise of resurrection and life. Dilsey's own family, what is left of it, is with her: her daughter Frony and her grandson Luster. And of course Benjy, who can be taken to the Negro church because the white people don't want him in theirs. This congregation is surely the despised and rejected, the outcasts of the earth. The preacher is a famous black evangelist, brought in for the occasion.…

Only one scene remains to be played out. Back at the house, Benjy begins moaning again. He knows, powerfully and unanswerably, that Quentin is gone, as her mother was gone before her. Dilsey tries everything to comfort and quiet him. There is only one recourse left. Much against her better judgement, Dilsey allows Luster to drive Benjy in the ancient ramshackle surry for his usual Sunday visit to the cemetery. Luster is very full of himself, bantering with the other Negroes. He notes that Jason's car is back, parked on the Square. In his self-importance, Luster drives to the wrong side of the statue of the Confederate soldier. Instantly terrified by the dislocation of tangible objects, Benjy begins his loud terrified bellowing: "There was more than astonishment in it, it was horror; shock; agony eyeless, tongueless; just sound.…" Jason's apathy and resignation vanish as this old focus of his festering resentment presents itself. In Jefferson, at least, Jason will still be able to control and abuse his own family, or at least Benjy and the Negro children who depend on him for a living.…

Like Dilsey, we have seen the beginning. This is the ending. No effort can explain the intricate web of all the themes of the novel, nor account for the power of this closing scene. It is all there: cruelty, hatred, race, the family, tradition, history, time, the dead and buried past that will not rise again. In the Appendix, one can learn what eventually happened to the Compsons. Jason will turn up a few times, a cotton-buyer now, who will take another heavy loss when he tries to outsmart Flem Snopes. Benjy lives on in the asylum at Jackson. Perhaps it is Caddy in the photograph, perhaps not. Dilsey, who lived long enough to see that too, will not tell us. These endured.

Source: John L. Longley Jr., "'Who Never Had a Sister': A Reading of The Sound and the Fury", in Mosaic, Vol. VII, No. 1, Fall, 1973, pp. 35-53.

Sources

Clifton Fadiman, "Hardly Worth While," Nation, January 15, 1930, pp. 74-75.

Robert J. Griffin, "Ethical Point of View in The Sound and the Fury," in Essays in Modern American Literature, edited by Richard E. Langford, Stetson University Press, 1963, pp. 55-64.

Terry Heller, in Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Salem Press, 1991, pp. 1088-1110.

Arthur Mizener, "William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury," in Twelve Great American Novels, New American Library, 1967, pp. 120-59.

Frances Lamont Robbins, in a review in Outlook and Independent, Vol. 153, No. 7, October 16, 1929, pp. 268-69.

Evelyn Scott, in On Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury," Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1929.

Olga W. Vickery, "Worlds of Counterpoint" in The Novels of William Faulkner, Louisiana State University Press, 1959.

Linda W. Wagner, in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 9: American Novelists, 1910–1945, Gale, 1981, pp. 282-302.

For Further Study

Margaret D. Bauer, "The Evolution of Caddy: An Intertextual Reading of 'The Sound and the Fury' and Ellen Gilchrist's 'The Annunciation'," in Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 25, No. 1, fall, 1992, pp. 40-51.

Bauer describes Caddy as both a strong woman who chooses to live according to her own value system, and as a victim who is ultimately broken down by her family. In addition to reviewing the question of incest, Bauer also discusses parental neglect and Caddy's abandonment of her daughter.

Michael H. Cowan, compiler, Twentieth-Century Interpretations of "The Sound and the Fury": A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, 1968.

This book collects important essays on the novel that were previously published in other books or journals.

David Dowling, Macmillan Modern Novelists: William Faulkner, Macmillan, 1989.

In his section on The Sound and the Fury, Dowling touches on many of the novel's major themes, including time, loss, and incest. He also suggests that the Compson parents offer two theories of language that represent the two extremes of meaningless flux and frozen meaning.

Richard Gray, The Life of William Faulkner: A Critical Biography, Blackwell, 1994.

Gray's discussion of The Sound and the Fury is largely concerned with language: language is not only the medium of the novel but also its subject. He argues that Faulkner obliges the reader to recognize "how we constitute our reality, personal and social, with the words we use."

Vernon T. Hornbeck, Jr., "The Uses of Time in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury," in Papers on English Language and Literature, Vol. I, No. 1, winter, 1965, pp. 50-8.

Hornbeck analyzes how Faulkner relates time in The Sound and the Fury to each of his central characters.

Cheryl Lester, "Racial Awareness and Arrested Development: 'The Sound and the Fury' and the Great Migration," in The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, edited by Philip M. Weinstein, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 123-45.

Arguing that mainstream historiography in the post-Reconstruction South has been constructed primarily from a white Southern viewpoint, Lester focuses on the story told by African-American historiography, and in particular, the phenomenon of black migration from the South to the North.

Noel Polk, editor, New Essays on "The Sound and the Fury," Cambridge University Press, 1993.

A collection of interpretations of the novels written specifically for the volume.

Kevin Railey, "Cavalier Ideology and History: The Significance of Quentin's Section in 'The Sound and the Fury'," in Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 3, autumn, 1992, pp. 77-94.

Railey argues that Quentin symbolizes the ideological conflict experienced by those who felt alienated by the changing world of the New South, and that his section epitomizes the struggle of the Cavalier Ideology.

Diane Roberts, Faulkner and Southern Womanhood, The University of Georgia Press, 1994.

Roberts interrogates the stereotypes of the Southern woman in Faulkner's fiction. Her book includes detailed discussions of Caddy Compson and Dilsey.