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Student Paper:
The Sound of the Fury
By:
Erik J. -- York
High School -- Jaime Miller, Teacher
The
name for William Faulkner’s tragic tale of the Compson family comes from a
scene in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which says, “[Life] is a tale
/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.”
Indeed Faulkner’s words are furious, and they tell a tale of a grand
southern family living in the romantic imagery of Yoknapatwpha County,
Mississippi: a family that falls from grandeur.
The life of this fallen family is narrated through the three sons and by
a fourth omniscient speaker.
Through the use of the technique of multiple narration, Faulkner conveys
to the reader a similar story told four times, which functions in illustrating
the various rises and falls of the story – the falling from grace, the decline
of the Compson family in general, and, symbolically, the crucifixion and the
resurrection of Jesus Christ – within the chaotic, the troubled, and the evil
minds of the narrators.
Benjy Compson, the chaotic mind,
has “been three years old thirty years” (Faulkner 17).
Born with severe mental retardation, Benjy is a three year old in the
body of a thirty-three year old grown man.
The simple syntax of his narration reflects his retardation; the chaotic
nature of his story reflects his inability to think logically and to discern
past from present.
Although chaotic, he is able to discern what is right and what is wrong,
for he is blessed with the gift of morality in a family without.
Benjy is incapable of sin and evil because he is naturally good.
In addition, he has been physically sterilized, a particularly traumatic
event in his life, and thus can never fall in the spiritual sense; in contrast,
he often falls to the ground because he is clumsy.
Like Eve before she gains knowledge, Benjy never speaks.
He will forever live in the land of the innocents because he will never
gain knowledge.
The
day of Benjy’s narration takes place on his thirty-third birthday, the age at
which Jesus Christ is crucified.
Benjy is pure as is Christ; Benjy is the Christ figure of The Sound
and the Fury.
Faulkner is severely bashed for representing Christ as a retardate, but
this in fact serves a very real purpose: an archetypal person possesses
impurities and can never be like Christ because he can never be pure like
Christ. Benjy
is special, and he is pure, just as Christ is special and pure.
In
spite of his mental inadequacies, Benjy is exceptionally aware of his
surroundings. Before
Caddy’s loss of virginity, Benjy constantly remarks how she “smelled like
trees” (43).
He becomes tremendously distressed when Caddy lets him smell her perfume,
for the impure scents taint her freshness.
Then one day, Caddy no longer smells like trees.
The beginnings of Caddy’s promiscuities, the progression of which
forever take Caddy away from Benjy’s life, are vividly recalled by Benjy in
his narrative when he cries:
Her
hand was against her mouth and I saw her eyes and I cried.
She stopped again, against the wall, looking at me and I cried and she
went on and I came on, crying, and she shrank against the wall, looking at me.
She opened the door to her room, but I pulled at her dress and we went to
the bathroom and she stood against the door, looking at me.
Then she put her arm across her face and I pushed at her, crying. (69)
Benjy
understands that Caddy is a changed girl, and he dislikes this change in her.
Whereas Benjy has reached maturity at three years old, Caddy continues to
grow up and mature, and as she rises physically and emotionally, spiritually,
she falls. Growing
up is an inescapable fall; only those who are incapable of growing up never
fall.
Many years before, when they are
very young, the Compson children go to the branch for a swim, and Caddy wets her
dress in the water.
She takes it off so it can dry, and “Quentin slapped her and she
slipped and fell down in the water.
When she got up she began to splash water on Quentin, and Quentin
splashed water on Caddy. ‘I’ll run away and never come back.’
Caddy was all wet and muddy behind, and I started to cry” (19,18).
Because mud signifies their sins while water is the absolution of their
sins, this fundamental scene foreshadows precisely what is to come in the later
lives of the children; Quentin is angered by Caddy’s fall, and then they try
to wash away each other’s sins.
Caddy is sinful and though she tries, she cannot rid herself of her sins.
She is forced to run away after she has Miss Quentin, and she leaves
Benjy in tears.
Both Benjy and Quentin desire an
exact order to their lives.
When “Luster hit Queenie again and swung her to the left at the
monument, for an instant Ben sat in an utter hiatus.
Then he bellowed.
It was horror; shock; agony eyeless, tongueless; just sound” (320).
His whole life, Ben has been satisfied only with a correct order in his
universe. Luster
goes left when he should go right.
Caddy is promiscuous when she should remain pure.
Caddy is sent away when she should stay and be a mother to her baby and
to Benjy. He
realizes everything that is not in its proper place while no one else does.
Powerless Benjy cries, and Quentin is neurotic and persistent when his
life is contaminated.
Benjy
has no concept of time, but for Quentin, time is everything, everything
degrading in his life.
Quentin, who encompasses a realization of the concept of past and
present, loathes his past memories of Caddy’s promiscuities with other men,
especially those with Dalton Ames, the father of Miss Quentin.
Quentin wishes to eradicate himself of his dirty past, which is why he
stomps on his shadow in an effort to kill it, his past, and why he attempts to
annihilate his watch; he fails to do either.
Quentin is impotent at everything he attempts.
He demonstrates his incestuous love for his sister when he “wiped mud
from [his] legs smeared it on her wet hard turning body” (137).
Quentin desires to dirty his sister for whom he has a sexual attraction,
yet he only enviously watches other men have sexual relations with her, and he
fails to take their places.
And, both Julio and Gerald Bland are better fighters than he.
Quentin abhors Gerald Bland; not only does Gerald, who has many
scandalous affairs with women, remind Quentin of Dalton Ames, but Gerald has a
mother who loves and takes pride in him, something that Quentin never
experiences. Quentin
never forgets that both he and Caddy never had a real mother, and he blames the
perpetually weak, ill woman for both of their downfalls.
Quentin’s only resolution and only victory is death; his obsession with
cleanliness and perfection, which he is unable to fulfill, leads to his suicide
by water and is a symbolic purification and supreme stoppage of time.
The construction of Quentin’s section is jumbled in the beginning, and
then becomes increasingly more coherent.
This functions to portray the maturation of the individual, namely
Quentin; upon his creation, the world is wondrous and makes no sense, but with
knowledge and the loss of innocence, he is able to understand the world and its
evils. Only
painful memories throw the syntax and Quentin back into tumult.
Jason Compson, the evil third
brother, maintains the downward spiral of the falling family because, like the
other children, he never has adequate parenting.
He lies to and steals from his mother and pockets thousands of dollars
from his sister and niece; in short, Jason is a thief whose life revolves around
lies and vengeance upon his sister Caddy, the reason for whom Jason never rises
to prominence.
For his brother Quentin, the family sells Benjy’s field so that he may
go to Harvard, whereas Jason never rightfully receives anything from his family.
Miss Quentin, the daughter of his fallen sister, who shares the name of
the family’s departed golden child, embodies the two people Jason hates most.
Jason detaches Miss Quentin from her mother, and thus the cycle of absent
parenting persists.
A girl who lacks a strong mother, Caddy fails to realize that she is
continuing the cycle of bad parenting, the disaster that causes the fall of the
Compson family, by not being a real mother for Miss Quentin.
Jason metaphorically kills the Compson family, including Benjy, the
portrayal of Christ; thus, Jason is the Antichrist.
The dates that Faulkner specifies as the days of the narrations are
symbolic to the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Beginning chronologically with Jason, his narration falls on Good Friday;
Christ is killed on this day, just as Jason is the figurative killer of Benjy
within The Sound and the Fury.
The section narrated by the fourth all-knowing speaker transpires on
Easter Sunday, the day of the resurrection of Christ.
The renaissance of Caddy within Miss Quentin, when she takes back the
money from Jason that is rightfully hers, signifies the rebirth of hope, of
faith in purity and good.
A solid figure in the book, Dilsey, the Compson’s old black cook cries
after the Easter Sunday sermon, “I’ve seen de first en de last.
I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin” (297).
The Compson family has ended, and now something entirely new can be
reborn from the muddy rubble.
The Compson era has fallen.
Works
Cited
Faulkner,
William. The
Sound and the Fury.
New York: Vintage Books, 1984.
Shakespeare, William. Macbeth.
William
Faulkner
Text Courtesy of the FBI -
Freedom of Information Act
The FBI investigated a possible extortion violation in 1957 when the wife of the famous author received several phone calls asking for $500 for certain information about her husband.
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