While we discussed briefly the concept of narrative limitations—i.e., a narrator’s inability to categorically convey the multitude of actions, thoughts, and visuals at any given moment in the novel—during our last class, having actually never read Faulkner, I found it rather unique that Benjy’s narrative was spotted with moments that imply a narrative fault.  This is more than just simply Benjy’s being a ‘looney’; Faulkner’s style calls attention to the inadequacy of literature to convey omnipresence, as both a narrator and a writer creating a narrative.  In multiple scenes, or flashes of dissected time—how else could we label Faulkner’s style?—Benjy acts as a visceral sponge: his narrative is limited by his sole perception, and moments are created where action is implied without the narrator explicitly mentioning such an action.

As Luster, Benjy, and T.P. attempt to sell a golf ball acquired through questionable means, Luster’s dialogue exemplifies such a moment: “’I’ll declare’.  Luster said.  ‘You fusses when you dont see them and you fusses when you does.  Why cant you hush.  Don’t you reckon folks get tired of listening to you all the time.  Here.  You dropped your jimson weed’.  He picked it up and gave it back to me’. (54).  Though it is Benjy narrating the events, his own actions (dropping the jimson weed) remain strangely non-disclosed; it is through Luster that we learn that Benjy is also ‘moaning’ and ‘fuss[ing]’, although in a normal narrative, be it first, second, or third, we would normally expect Benjy’s actions to twine with others’ as they unfold, but they’re left markedly absent.  It also marks Benjy’s animal-like conscious, as his own actions lack a cognitive distinction (at least cognitive enough to become part of the narrative), while his visceral actions and experiences become the forefront of his section.

A similar scene occurs toward the beginning of the novel, as the Compson children sneak around the house after Damuddy’s funeral.  Caddy and Jason argue about whether or not is a funeral, and, as Caddy replies to Jason, she tells T.P. that “He wants your lightning bugs, T.P.  Let him hold it a while” (36).  Alone, this sentence would make little sense, but it isn’t until the next line that we learn that it is Benjy, who is narrating, that keeps going after the bottle (“T.P. gave me the bottle of lightning bugs”) (36).  Throughout Benjy’s recent narration, there has been constant action from Benjy that the reader has not been privy to, and that Benjy’s narrative is ultimately selective.

In these two examples, Benjy’s own actions are not technically narrated, but implied as a given, whether purposefully or not; applied to the rest of the characters, the reader is reminded that there is a constant failure to communicate the sheer enormity of actions, minutiae or not, of even a simple scene; applied to the larger sense of literature, and we can see a glaring hole in its ability to accurately tell a tale, fictional or otherwise.  Although I think the term ‘unreliable narrator’ shares some common elements, I don’t think it is accurate enough to apply to such an abstruse literary phenomenon, considering the somewhat divisive possibility of becoming a universalism in all forms of writing—and perhaps any form of art.

-Michael Monahan

     There seems to be an issue of identity within the TSAF. There is a definite rift between the true identity and the public image of the Compsons, Benjy, Caddy, and Quentin. The Compson family seems to be making attempts in maintaining a traditional honorable southern image. The mother’ s pride is constantly referenced in explanation of her behavior. She is an absentee parent to her children and deems her “idiot” son Benjy and pregnant daughter as a punishment that she wishes to run from. 

 Benjy’s inner self is hidden from everyone around him. His inability to communicate besides through inarticulate moans leaves him as a complete outsider whose needs are never understood. He is mainly kept inside the house and or on the Compson grounds to avoid letting him blemish their “respectable” name. His name is changed in order to improve his “luck” or make a “bluegum”(68) out of him according to Versh.  The supernatural aspect of a “bluegum” seems to speak to how segregated Benjy/Maury is kept from the rest of the family and culture. 

Quentin’s experiences with Caddy and his attempts to break the Compson clean image by “committing” incest is the climax of my theory. He admits to his father that he wanted to say it happened, because he believed it would “isolate her out of the 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”(176).  He wants to sacrifice their public image and honor in order to protect his sister from her socially sophisticated fate of marrying up and reliving the false lifestyle of their mother. 

ps: This  post/theory  is rambling. I could go on like this but I’ll spare ya’ll. 

            The recurring motif of virginity, in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, is evident in both Benjy and Quentin’s chapter.  One of the most central images in the novel is when Caddy is getting muddy in creek. Caddy’s dress becoming dirty is a symbol of her impurity. Her impurity is something that is referred back to in the text by both Benjy and Quentin and furthermore is essential to the building of the story.

            The motif of virginity is further explored in Quentin’s chapter as he obsesses over his own virginity. For example, in the passage:

“In the South you are ashamed of being a virgin. Boys. Men. They lie about it. Because it means less to women, Father said. He said it was men invented virginity not women. Father said it’s like death: only a state in which the others are left and I said, But to believe it doesn’t matter and he said, That’s what’s so sad about anything: not only virginity and I said, Why couldn’t it have been me and not her who is unvirgin and he             said, That’s why that’s sad too; nothing is even worth changing of it, and Shreve said if he’s got better sense than to chase after the little dirty sluts and I said Did you ever have a sister? Did you? Did you?” (78).

the reader learns that Quentin is a virgin and while it seems as if it may not bother him on the surface it is something that his father is putting pressure on him about. His father equates being a virgin with death and it is something that a Southern male should be embarrassed of. The line “her who is unvirgin” allows the reader to be fully aware of Caddy’s impurity.  Quentin obsesses over the fact that his sister is not a virgin and he is. And as the chapter proceeds the reader begins to learn that Quentin believes that incest with his sister Caddy is a fitting “solution” to his problem. The line “ Did you ever have a sister? Did you? Did you?” infers not only to the potential act of incest and sexual tension that might be there, but also the repetition of ‘did you’ can lead the reader to believe that her impurity, his purity, and his fantasy is something that is truly eating away at him. Again, the obsession and connotation with virginity is explored in the following passage:  “And Father said it is because it’s because you are a virgin: don’t you see? Women are never virgins. Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature. It’s nature that is hurting you not Caddy and I said you dont know” (116).  Here the reader can see that Quentin’s father, in a somewhat twisted way, is consoling Quentin. Father tells Quentin to not be upset with Caddy for being impure, but to be upset with nature. Virginity is described here somewhat as a curse and very much unnatural. It is unclear, but perhaps Father is consoling Quentin’s frustrating and furthermore growing sexual want for Caddy. He is reassuring him that it is natural for him to feel this way because the “unnatural” state of virginity is withholding something from Quentin. There is obviously something here that Quentin is struggling with and cannot understand that directly correlates to his virginity. It seems as if the only way he can let go of this building and unnatural tension is to commit an impure act.  

The concept of time is obviously important to Faulkner, though he incorporates time in such different ways in the first two sections of The Sound and the Fury. While Benjy has no concept of time, Quentin is obsessed with it – so much so that he breaks his own watch in a failed attempt to somehow escape time. What Benjy and Quentin do have in common though is their shared focus on Caddy. Because Benjy has no concept of time, his narrative slips seamlessly into the past. Certain words, images, or places in his present situation with Luster trigger past events, many of which center around Caddy. The golfers yelling for their caddies, wading through the branches, and eating in the kitchen all cause Benjy to relive past experiences with Caddy as if they were happening in the present. Quentin, on the other hand, is living more in the past than the present, as he wanders around Cambridge and Boston mulling over memories relating to Caddy.

Both Benjy and Quentin seem to directly associate the fall of their family’s prestige with Caddy’s sexual delinquencies. Benjy’s narrative mentions more than one instance when he becomes upset as a result of Caddy’s promiscuity, as when she kisses Charlie under the tree and first wears perfume. Benjy knows that Caddy’s actions are looked down upon, but how does he know? Is it because Caddy was the only one who truly loved and protected Benjy, and he can somehow connect her sexual experiences to her ultimate disappearance from his life? It seems as if Benjy’s narrative, in its confusing chronology, represents his own confusion of his present situation. Why are people playing golf in the pasture? Where did all the animals go that were once in the barn? Where is Caddy? Where is Quentin? The present events trigger memories in the past as Benjy tries to put the pieces of the puzzle together and figure out what has been happening around him for the past thirty years.

Quentin is also clearly obsessed with Caddy’s sexual behavior, but the reasons why are unclear. He fantasizes and lies about an incestual relationship – first when he falsely claims to be the father of Caddy’s baby and second when he tries to convince Caddy to tell everyone that he took her virginity. Why is it that Quentin thinks Caddy would be better off with people believing that she was sexually active with him than with somebody outside of the family? One possible theory is that Quentin is a closet homosexual, and is simply using Caddy for his own gain. If he can convince people that he is the father of Caddy’s baby, than he at least they won’t question his sexuality. We see Quentin struggling with ideas of manhood both in the present and the past as when he loses two fights – one with Caddy’s future husband and one with Gerald. The only woman he shows interest in is Caddy, though he seems only concerned with her reputation. His relationship with Natalie seems only to serve the purpose of making Caddy jealous, and perhaps proving to Caddy, Natalie, and maybe even himself, that he is not gay. Quentin dwells on the past as he contemplates his family’s “fall” because I think he blames himself. He thinks back on times in which he failed to portray a certain masculine image. Quentin is always trying to escape the past, perhaps because he feels that only by escaping the past can he escape his true homosexual identity. The constant ticking of his broken watch acts as a reminder that he cannot escape the past and cannot escape his own identity, and he believes suicide is the only option.

It will come as a surprise to absolutely no one that I am struggling with The Sound and the Fury. My general discomfort with Faulkner is not being aided by the novel’s nonlinear and convoluted narration in the first two sections. While I understand, for example, why Benjy’s narration is so scattered it’s still incredibly aggravating to read it. It’s a brilliant literary technique and it’s a unique perspective on the life of the Compson family but it has done nothing to endear this novel to me. But even with all the confusion I still managed to work my way quickly through Benjy’s chapter. There is a method to the madness and once I could string together which events belonged where I was managing with relative competence. I haven’t fooled myself into thinking I really deeply understood the material but I also wasn’t wandering completely lost the entire time.

Quentin’s section, however, is an entirely different story. The constant narrative breaks and shifts through time with little or no advance notice are difficult to parse to say the least. I found myself feeling profoundly disturbed by the way his section is told. Divorced entirely from the actual content of the chapter the way it is written is upsetting. There is such jarring contrast between the actions Quentin narrates in the present and the flashbacks interspersed throughout as to be almost painful.

Quentin starts his section off describing in almost painful detail his entire surroundings. There is nothing harried or frantic in the way he presents himself in his room. He seems downright leisurely as he stands by the window and watches his fellow students “running for chapel” (78). The fact that he has even “quit moving around” and is instead making a spectacle of something he should be participating in suggests a certain lack of urgency (78) This Quentin is written with line breaks and punctuation and imparts in the reader a sense of calm even in the face of his clear anxiety over the ticking of the clock.

It is this sense that Quentin is merely telling the reader about the particulars of his day that makes the flashbacks to his past so difficult to experience. The reader is immediately tossed from a measured retelling of a mundane episode (a relatively uneventful day in life If you will) to a frantic memory. What is most difficult for me about this particular method of narration is the lack of punctuation in the telling. With no clear cues about where even one sentence ends and another begins the walls of text begin to overwhelm. In the paragraph beginning on 102 “what have I done to be given children like these […]” and ending “try to forget that the others ever were” on 104 is entirely without any form of punctuation. The reader is instead assailed with image after image of disappointment and almost forced to jostle their way through the text. It is impossible to really focus on one complaint; instead one must simply accept the entire two-page rant in one harried moment. Reading these run on sentences not only confused me but also made me feel anxious. It was as if I was being punished as a small child might be; with an adult yelling in my general direction and me just being forced to absorb as much as I could without completely comprehending anything.

But then, perhaps this feeling of anxiety is precisely what Faulkner was attempting to force his reader to feel. By contrasting calm and measured present with intense and attacking past one begins to feel how Quentin might be experiencing the world around him. Just as Benjy’s narration forces the reader to experience his mind, including muddling through the ways in which Benjy himself must make his own logic jumps in nonlinear time, so too does Quentin’s narration force the reader to confront his outward calm and how starkly it contrasts with his inner anxieties about his family and especially about his sister. Faulkner forces his reader to be uncomfortable in her own skin just as Quentin probably is. For me at least it is nearly panic inducing but perhaps in that panic there is something compelling about the confusing way the chapter is structured.

Faulkner has explained the four chapters of TSAF as consecutive attempts to tell the story of a dream vision, that of a little girl with “muddy drawers” high up a tree, spying on her grandmother’s funeral through a window and reporting what she sees to her brothers below. Faulkner thought first to tell it through the eyes of the “idiot child,” who knew “what” though not “why,” but deemed that insufficient. He then attempted with another brother and then another and finally with his own voice, but never felt that he got it right.

In my mind, the closest he came to success was with what he knew instinctively was his best shot, the Benjy chapter. Benjy’s lack of judgment and understanding results in the book’s the most accurate and beautiful depiction of the Compson world and its collapse. Through him, we witness Jason’s smallness and cruelty, Luster’s apathy and bored sadism, Caddy’s natural kindness and tough independence and Dilsey’s moral center and noble sacrifice. This is the chapter with the strongest emotional core, based in Benjy’s inarticulable love for Caddy and the sense of loss he experiences when she is gone without the understanding, or even recognition, of that absence. Because of these factors, Benjy’s chapter captures the sadness of Caddy’s tragedy far better than any of the others. It was also the most purely enjoyable for me, for these reasons, but also because it was the quickest read, the most immersive, and the most sensory. Benjy is a more sympathetic narrator than Quentin or Jason, and the challenge of “deciphering the puzzle” was a bit of fun.

From there, each successive chapter offers diminishing returns. Quentin’s chapter is a wonderfully composed divergence (it is the only chapter not set in Yoknapatawpha, after all, except in brief flashbacks). I am surprised that not more has been said (or has it?) about the similarities between Quentin’s chapter and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Though Holden Caulfield is a few years younger than Quentin, he shares his intelligence, sexual anxieties, protectiveness toward his sister and sense of alienation. Both works feature a wandering first person narrative that accompanies a plot consisting mostly of one character literally wandering, with interpersonal conflicts clouded by an introverted, sometimes dissociative point of view. But I digress. Quentin’s chapter, though fantastic, feels largely tangential.

The last two chapters are weak, especially the Jason chapter, which can only climb as high as its grating, caricaturish narrator can take it, overly dependent as it is on his constant opining and self-congratulation. Dilsey, who struggles so fiercely to hold the Compson family together (God knows why – let it burn!), is perhaps the most likable and respectable character in the book, but she deserves her own life and her own self, and we only get to view her through the prism of her role as the Compsons’ servant. This makes the final chapter unsatisfying. To me, the primary value of TSAF’s second half is in the details of plot they provide that further illuminate the goings-on of the first two sections.

Finally, I’ll share Faulkner’s own analysis as to why Caddy didn’t get her own chapter:

“That–the explanation of the whole book is in that…Caddy was still to me too beautiful and too moving to reduce her to telling what was going on, that it would be more passionate to see her through somebody else’s eyes, I thought.” — from an interview at the University of Virginia, 1957.

As others have mentioned in their posts, the central plot in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is the disintegration of the Compson family. It is fitting that Faulkner narrates this familial breaking apart in an equally broken style. Benjy’s mind moves seamlessly through time and Quentin’s circular narration reads like an intense rumination. Through these fragments readers must piece together an understanding of the plot. However, it is not only the narrative style that parallels the plot in its fragmentation, the novel is loaded with liminal, suspended, and broken images and symbols. There is the handless watch throughout Quentin’s chapter, Benjy’s halted mental age, and even the trading of the fireflies to pacify Benjy, a bug which only illuminates when suspended in mid-air. However, in this post I am interested in how Benjy’s sense perception and (what seems like) synesthesia work to illuminate the Compson family’s troubles.

Benjy’s sense of smell is established early and is an occasional frustration for the other characters throughout his chapter. His sense of smell offers insight into each character, the most prominent of which is Caddy’s tree scent. Benjy also knows Damuddy has died through smell, “Then the room came, but my eyes went shut. I didn’t stop. I could smell it” (34). Benjy’s way of experiencing and knowing this death is at odds with his siblings’ who bicker over whether the goings-on are a party or a funeral. Caddy and Jason stubbornly take opposite views and eventually seek visual proof, a sensory confirmation Benjy doesn’t need. It is important that the sensory differences between siblings are heightened at this moment of familial crisis.

These disparate ways of experiencing are further confused in Quentin’s chapter when he attempts to explain Benjy’s sense of smell, “He smell what you tell him when he want to, dont have to listen nor talk” (89). We see this in the first instance we learn of Benjy’s sense of smell, presented as synesthesia, “I couldn’t feel the gate at all, but I could smell the bright cold” (6). Here, not only are Benjy’s experiences different from the other characters, but the senses themselves have been rearranged. This is of particular interest in the chapter’s ending when Benjy describes a collective synesthesia. Moving from one of Benjy’s memories into another, he first describes himself alone, clutching the slipper, “I couldn’t see it, but my hands saw it, and I could hear it getting night” (72), and then narrates a bedtime scene in which he is put to bed together with Caddy, “We could hear us. We could hear the dark” (75). It is as if Benjy’s strange perceptive qualities are bridged by this moment of sibling closeness. The only other moment (I could find) in which Benjy describes a sense perception using a collective pronoun is when he is sitting on his father’s lap with Quentin sitting nearby and Jason just outside, “We could hear the roof and the fire, and a snuffling outside the door” (68). This too comes during a moment of familial tenderness.

I find these instances important as Faulkner’s plot and characters in The Sound and the Fury are illuminated more through symbol and image than through a linear narrative style.

It’s clear throughout the second section of the novel that Quentin is beset with anxiety about his sister’s purity (or lack thereof). He goes to great lengths to try to defend her honor, confronting Dalton Ames on the bridge, obsessing over the memory of her pregnancy, and trying to take the blame for it by lying about having committed incest. However, reading this section for the second or third time, I found myself thinking about the distinction between the noble impulse to defend a sister’s honor and a cruder feeling of sexual jealousy.

Quentin demands clarification from Caddy about her romantic exploits in many of the memories depicted in this section. He wants to know if it hurt, if she loves them, if she thinks about them, and so forth. It is not clear, however, why any of that actually matters to Quentin. Is he simply a good brother who wants to make sure his sister settles down with an honest man? Or, is he so overcome with jealousy that he regards all male suitors as threats? In one memory, his father tells him that he is only upset about Caddy’s loss of virginity because he is himself still a virgin. Though Quentin is desperate to prove his agency in any way possible (even wishing he had “at least” bled on Gerald), his lack of sexual prowess is of particular interest with respect to his relationship with Caddy.

The memory on pages 133-139 describes Quentin’s sexual encounter with a girl from town, Natalie. As the two “dance sitting down” in the family’s barn, Caddy catches them in the act, prompting Quentin to insult Natalie and attempt to provoke Caddy. After Caddy asserts that she “doesn’t give a damn” what Quentin was doing, he chases after her, demanding her attention by smearing hog shit on her. Clearly his relationship with Natalie was not a storybook romance, and his sexual awkwardness suggests that he pursues sex only to combat his general feeling of powerlessness. At the end of the section, Quentin recalls that Caddy “never was a queen or a fairy she was always a king or a giant or a general.” Perhaps Caddy’s sexual eagerness as an adolescent is linked to a kind of inherent ambition that is at once un-ladylike and out of Quentin’s reach.

On page 151, Caddy asks him if he has done what she did (sex), and he replies “yes yes lots of times with lots of girls.” This assertion rings hollow, and Caddy is almost patronizing in her expression of sympathy, repeating the phrase “poor Quentin” throughout the encounter. This is one of the more memorable and jarring scenes in the section, with overtly sexual language being used to describe an attempted suicide pact. Fittingly, Quentin is unable to go through with it even with Caddy repeatedly asking him to do so. Though his paralysis is a general motif throughout the section, the sexual overtones of this scene are essential to understanding his despair regarding Caddy.

In the climactic moment of the section, we learn that Quentin attacks Gerald, and are told after the fact why, from Quentin’s roommate Shreve. “He was blowing off as usual…about his women. You know: like he does, before girls, so they don’t know exactly what he’s saying….how he lay there being sorry for her waiting on the pier for him, without him there to give her what she wanted” (166). Gerald’s excessive boasting prompts Quentin to snap: “Did you ever have a sister?” Again, there is tension between Quentin’s desire to be honorable, and the possibility that he is simply sexually inexperienced, and therefore resents more virile, masculine figures.

So, I’m not sure where I’m going with all of this. Clearly there are double standards (both in the book and today) when it comes to promiscuity and sexual liberation. While some readers might see Quentin as an overly sensitive figure fighting to uphold his sister’s dignity, it may be that he is simply sexually frustrated, and takes these frustrations out on his sister (and her lovers).

Then again, I never had a sister, either.

Of course, Faulkner’s prose is hyper-saturated with symbol. At the risk of tackling the most obvious example in the Quentin chapter (or of all time?), I’d like to shine a brief spotlight on a few of the “shadows” that slanted across my first reading of the first half of The Sound and The Fury. I’d like to suggest that the heap of overt shadow imagery early in the chapter lays the groundwork for implicit shadows that are developed or come to light in later pages.

Quentin’s chapter begins with concrete shadow. His first impression upon waking: “When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtain it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch” (76). Metaphorically, then, his initial thought goes to his dark past, and presumably his dark chore along the river for this, his last day. Even after he attempts to muffle time by placing his watch face down on the desk, “the shadow of the sash was still there and I had learned to tell almost to the minute” (77). The invocation is of a sundial, of time unavoidable. (“There was a clock, high up in the sun…” (83).) By extension, I’m pretty sure we could say that it’s not modern devices/conditions dragging Quentin down, but an unshakable, age-old code of honor, sin and salvation, and also memory. The sun of social expectation. And of course, a “sash” is referenced, which makes me think of either a uniform (an upstanding male) or a chastity belt. A heavy start.  

 Shortly into the chapter, another remarkable shadow passage rears its head along the river: “The shadow of the bridge, the tiers of railing, my shadow leaning flat upon the water, so easily had I tricked it that would not quit me. At least fifty feet it was, and if I only had something to blot it into the water, holding it until it drowned, the shadow of the package like two shoes wrapped up lying on the water. Niggers say a drowned man’s shadow was watching for him in the water all the time. It twinkled and glinted like breathing …” (90). Here we have a kind of hall of shadows that presents a number of ideas: Quentin believes his shadow, his moral outline, is terminally tall and precedes him. He seems to hope that his moral baggage can be “tricked” or avoided; but it’s not a serious hope, apparently, since his suicide looms over him in the shadow of the flat-irons (throughout the day, he also runs from this shadow, putting off the act—and perhaps he doesn’t follow through?) Then the notion that, even drowned, his past will wait for him, that his faults/indiscretions will haunt him from beyond the grave. Finally, of course, the allusion to race and its conflict, one massive shadow underlying the text.

There are more literal shadows to collect down the line, such as “the bitten shadows of the elm flowing upon my hand” (171). But “shadows” are compiled early in the chapter most especially, perhaps a foundation for later implicit resonation. I risk engaging in semantic play or easy parallel—of simply running with Faulkner’s metaphor—but, for example, could one say that the flashbacks, the interspersed recollections italicized or otherwise, are a shadow narrative or consciousness? Or that Quentin is a shadow to Caddy when he accompanies her to meet Dalton in the dark, after their near double-suicide pact? Even at the edge of the pond, he and Caddy literally lie upon each, like shadows. (Perhaps useful to note here Quentin’s early impulse to kill his shadow by “blotting it” into the water.)

 In some cases, I think Faulkner’s use of symbol, when it echoes so thoroughly, might work as what T.S. Eliot describes as an “objective correlative” (from the internet): “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”  In other words, an emotional shadow thrown by a symbol. Quentin’s depression and all its causes are cast in this word.

And yet, perhaps a “shadow” intrinsically has its correlative—or maybe it’s simply a cliché, even then, with which Faulkner nonetheless works magic. In any case, I wonder if terms like “shadow” or “honeysuckle,” especially when referenced in the fragmented flashbacks and stream of consciousness, are usefully categorized as such? Or do they push way beyond Eliot’s basic definition (and its use in imagist poetry), because of the complicated, hall-of-mirrors nature of Faulkner’s prose?

Would be glad for any comments about shadows, and looking forward to discussion. –Nick