The Sound and the Fury is a four-part novel, told from different character’s perspectives. The first three sections are narrated in the first person perspective of each of the three Compson sons: Benjy, Quentin, and Jason. Naturally we would expect the final section to focus on Caddy, the last of the Compson children and a significant character in all three of the previous sections. However, the narrative perspective shifts from the first person perspective of a Compson to a third person perspective, and the focus is not on Caddy but Dilsey, the family cook.

The choice to follow Dilsey over Caddy is an interesting choice by Faulkner. Caddy plays a pivotal role in the lives of each of her brothers’ lives and narratives, and that is the only role she is given. She is a major character in the novel, possibly even the main character, but her story is not about her life but how her life affected everyone around her. In each of these sections Caddy has in some way disgraced the family name, to the point that Mrs. Compson does not even want her name said in the house. Therefore, the reason that we do not hear from the last of the Compson children may be because she is no longer considered a Compson, and does not have the authority of a narrative voice in the novel.

The last section of the book is not only the end of the story but the end of the Compson family. By this point in the timeline, Caddy has long left the family, Quentin has committed suicide, Benjy will probably end up hospitalized, and Jason is likely to live the rest of his days as a bachelor, never marrying or having children. The only future the Compsons had was in Miss Quentin, and with her running away they lose any future the family may have had. Since there are no other Compsons left to hear from, the story must be told from an outsider’s perspective, and who better to follow than the woman who has been there from the beginning.

In the final section Dilsey says, “I seed de beginning, en now I sees de ending” (297). Dilsey raised all of the Compson children (and one grandchild), especially Benjy. She has been the one holding the family together and the only person who still represents the southern values that the Compson family used to. She was there when the Compsons were a respectable southern family and she is there to see their downfall. Since she is on the outside she does not share in that downfall but remains strong in her southern Christian values, and moves forward with the time she has left.

Unlike the first three sections, Dilsey’s section is not obsessed with the past. Benji’s and Quentin’s chapters timeline was all over the place, jumping through the characters memories and making the reader feel like they were on a broken time machine. In Jason’s section he also shares a good amount of obsession with the past, especially in the grudge he holds against Miss Quentin and her mother. Dilsey section follows a linear timeline, one complete day without jumping through time, and she looks towards the future instead of obsessing over the past.

TSAF 186: “What the hell makes you want to keep him around here where people can see him?”

The quote above captures elements of the power dynamic that colors Jason’s relationship with most of the characters that populate his chapter.  Jason is driven to gain the upper hand in the micro-spheres of power in which he finds himself.  By exerting power over others, Jason seeks to control the image that he and his family present to the outside world.  The fact that he is preoccupied with this image is demonstrated in many textual moments, most notably, his concerns over Quentin’s behavior, Benjy’s person, and Caddy’s past.

In the textual moment cited above, Jason is featured giving orders and expressing power over Luster, the African American youth who cares for Benjy.  The common expression and interrogative opening of this sentence—“What the hell”—indicates that Jason’s question is rhetorical.  The speaker uses this phrase to interrogate Luster in a way that is designed to belittle him as much as spark Luster to remove Benjy from the front year.  Instead of questing the impetus of Luster’s actions, which would have read “What the hell makes you keep him around here,” Jason directs his inquiry to Luster’s cognition by questioning his rationale.  This is indicated with the word “want” in the phrase “What the hell makes you want to keep him around here.”  In other words, instead of asking “why did you do x,y,z,” Jason asks, “why did you want to do x,y,z.”  By focusing on the mental act of wanting, Jason questions Luster’s judgement and, indirectly, his intelligence.  Dehumanizing people of color by questioning their ability to reason has been a long standing strategy of whites to justify domination of the other.  Interestingly, this is the strategy that Jason adopts to demonstrate his mental superiority and exert power over this African American youth.

Judging by his repeated racist statements, Jason believes in white racial superiority.  He is uncomfortable with the power arrangement that African Americans have in a society in which they are still one step away from abject subjugation.  His racist rhetoric often centers on teaching African Americans a lesson about how easy they have things.  For example, he claims, “What this country needs is white labor.  Let these dam trifling niggers starve for a couple of years, then they’d see what a soft thing they have” (TSAF 191). This assertion proposes a lesson, conveyed through the experience of starvation, through which the African American would learn his/her place.  Rather than recommending physical violence, the act he proposes involves a form of mental domination of the African American.  On an individual level, Jason exerts control over the Compson family’s servants frequently via mental rather than physical coercion.  Jason is unhappy with the servants’ involvement in Compson family affairs.  He sees himself as the head of the household and, by the end of his chapter, he succeeds in securing this role by obtaining his mother’s complete submission to his authority.  Nonetheless, the resistance that Diley poses through her speech acts threatens Jason’s command of domestic affairs.  He illustrates his discomfort with servants’ interference when he claims, “That’s the trouble with nigger servants, when they’ve been with you for a long time they get so full of self importance that they’re not worth a dam.  Think they run the whole family” (TSAF 207).  Jason responds to Dilsey and other servants with his own demonstrations of power.  He relies on speech acts and mental manipulation to assert his superiority and power over the African Americans in his life.  Examples include the aforesaid interrogation of Luster’s judgement and the burning of the show tickets before Luster and Dilsey.  His relationship with African Americans is important for the social significance that it carries.  Being in total control of his servants, Jason sends a public message that his family strongly and cohesively united under his leadership.

The power and control that Jason seeks also influences his attitude towards his brother Benjy.  Jason directs Luster to take Benjy to the back of the house because he does not want “people” to “see” him.  His worry about Benjy being seen indicates Jason’s fixation on his brother’s visibility.  Benjy’s obvious disability becomes a detriment to the family when he is visible to “people” or the public.  Jason reveals his belief that Benjy is a freakish spectacle when he suggests that his mother “Rent him out to a sideshow” (TSAF 196). Jason’s concerns about his brother are greatly linked to the blemish that Benjy’s presence brings to the family image.  For this reason, Jason repeatedly suggests physically relocating Benjy to the asylum in Jackson.  When Jason questions why Luster wants to “keep” Benjy in the front, he indicates the confinement and positioning that characterize Benjy’s existence.  Benjy is a physically kept man.  To Jason, Benjy is an object that is defined by his physical location.  For this reason, physical removal resolves the threat that Benjy poses to the family.  Because he only conceives of Benjy as a physical entity, Jason employs physical tools in an effort to exert power over Benjy.  Relocating his brother to a cell in Jackson, is Jason’s desired ultimate method of expressing power over Benjy and the situation, thereby salvaging his and his family’s public appearance.

In conclusion, questions of power and control resound throughout Jason’s chapter.  This contrasts greatly with Quentin’s chapter which presents a man or youth who seems to have surrendered control of his environment and present condition.  Recognizing his powerlessness in the face of familial devastation, Quentin takes his own life.  On the other hand, Jason reacts to the humiliation of his family’s fall with anger and determination.  He resolves to reassemble the shambles of his family life by exerting power over the individuals with whom he comes into contact.  This is visible in the way he usurps family control from his mother, tries to curb Quentin’s behavior, dictates to the servants, pushes back against his boss, and threatens to send Benjy away.  Jason performs these acts with a desire to reshape the image that he and his family present to the world.

The final section of The Sound and The Fury is told by a narrator who is external to the events reported in the three previous sections presenting the perspectives of Benjy, Quentin, and Jason. In a climactic moment in this final section, often referred to as Dilsey’s, Faulkner juxtaposes the faith and compassion of Dilsey to the lack of understanding and casual racism of the narrator. At church on Easter Sunday, Dilsey experiences a moment of communion, passion, and fulfillment beyond words and outside of time. The narrator does not participate in and cannot understand this moment. Unlike Macbeth, Dilsey does not rail against the storm of life or the dusty road toward death, she endures.

The centrality of the character of Dilsey seems even stronger if we connect Eliot’s “fragments of ruin” from The Waste Land to the narrator description of the elderly Dilsey in her colorful Sunday dress: “as though muscle and tissue had been courage or fortitude which the days or the years had consumed until only the indomitable skeleton was left rising like a ruin or a landmark above the somnolent and impervious guts … the collapsed face … lifted into the driving day with an expression at once fatalistic and of a child’s astonished disappointment …” (266). It is Dilsey who will endure, who has seen the beginning and the end. She is a remnant Faulkner gives us.

The importance of the moment of resurrection in church is set up in Faulkner’s variation in language; from standard English to black dialect, from flowing prose to chant-like streams of half-sentences, the effect builds to an experience outside of/beyond language. We locate the emotion and connection of Shegog and Dilsey against the narrator. The narrator denigrates the black church as a “painted cardboard set” and undercuts Rev. Shegog who, unlike the regular minister who is a large man of “light coffee color … imposing in a frock coat and white tie,” is described as “undersized, in a shabby alpaca coat” with a “wizened black face like a small, aged monkey” (293). The racism of the South in the late 1920’s and the complicated representations of race in TSAF are crystallized with this section of the novel. Rev. Shegog proceeds to perform a spectacle and transforms his voice, fed “succubus Like” with his body and moves from “Brethren and sistern” and “I got the recollection and the blood of the Lamb!” to “Breddren en sistuhn!” and “I got de ricklickshun en de blood of de Lamb!” (294-5).

The narrator gives us an emotionally removed account of the transformation of the minister and the shared passionate experience of the congregants in the church, puzzled about what happens and how. “And the congregation seemed to watch with its own eyes while the voice consumed him, until he was nothing and they were nothing and there was not even a voice but instead their hearts were speaking to one another in chanting measures beyond the need for words, so that when he came to rest against the reading desk, his monkey face lifted and his whole attitude that of a serene, tortured crucifix that transcended its shabbiness and insignificance and made it of no moment …” (294-5). Faulkner attempts to create through language an experience beyond words and uses the distance of the narrator to represent the failure of language to communicate what he is reaching for, what only music (“chanting measures”) can really convey. John T. Matthews observes the importance of Faulkner’s changing dialects “as if the shuttling between the ‘white’ and ‘black’ language creates the only authenticity possible, a kind of dialectical artifice that acknowledges the means of production in the midst of reproduction” (“Whose America? Faulkner, Modernism, and National Identity” 83). Benjy, the only white person in the church, sits “rapt in his sweet blue gaze” as the minister preaches and congregants shout out and Dilsey sits next to him crying, he is undisturbed (297). Of this moment in the novel, Matthews notes that “Faulkner refuses to dodge the fundamental inauthenticity that laces this moment of indisputable eloquence, symbolic gravity, passion” (84). Complexity that is beyond words.

Dilsey says “I’ve seed de first en de last” (297). We can attempt to translate this to mean that she saw the beginning of the Compsons and will see their end, or that she recognizes her own mortality as dust and will return to dust, or that she knows that all that remains is ruins, and all that there is- is to endure.

{Names are important and every author invests them with some hidden history. It is curious to note that the house that Faulkner bought and renamed Rowan Oak was “known locally as the Shegog Place, after Col. Robert B. Shegog, and Irishman from County Down” who had moved to Mississippi in the mid-nineteenth century and built the imposing Georgian-style house (Parini 155).}

Works Cited

Faulkner, William. The Sound and The Fury. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Matthews, John T. “Whose America? Faulkner, Modernism, and National Identity.” Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. 70-92.

Parini, Jay. One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner. New York: Harper Perennial, 2004.

The past can neither be contained, nor fully formed for the purposes of any one agenda. It is at all times a nebulous, yet present, force. It thrusts into the present, exposing the seams and inconsistencies of fabricated history defying all attempts at evasion. At the close of TSAF, this motif is succinctly shown in the simple juxtaposition of the broken flower and signboards that Benjy, now pacified from an earlier outburst, sees.

The broken flower drooped over Ben’s fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and facade flowed smoothly once more from left to right, post and tree, window and doorway and signboard each in its ordered place. (321)

The chaos that had broken out as Benjy attempted to take the reins of cart is returned to order. As the narrative voice draws our attention to Benjy’s perspective, the language utilized becomes intentional and controlled. The objects passing before his view “[flow] smoothley,” “left to right,” “each in its ordered place,” a succession of artifacts arranged intelligibly, as if the narrative has stabilized from a manic outburst.

Contrast this language with that used to describe Benjy’s outburst

Bellow on bellow, his voice mounted, with scarce interval for breath. There was more than astonishment in it, it was horror; shock; agony, eyeless, tongueless; just sound.  (320)

Benjy’s voice is pure chaos. It is an unintelligible sound that expresses pure abject humanity that refuses to be formed and repressed by understanding, “eyeless, tongueless; just sound.” It is here impossible to not remind oneself of Macbeth’s final soliloquy: “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Benjy’s outbursts, his moaning, are the release of irrepressible history. Only when he is given an object that reminds him of the past, is he again pacified, as if each object operates as a sort of salve temporarily covering a wound that will not heal. However, in every instance in TSAF, the objects he is given seem in some way corrupted. The flower he holds at the end is in this case broken. Shortly before this scene, Luster quiets him with a “white satin slipper. It was yellow now, cracked, and soiled, and when they gave it into Ben’s hand he hushed for awhile” (316). These objects stand in for the stories that each character tells them self to maintain their own self-constructed identity (perhaps much in the same way the South struggles to maintain an almost prelapsarian  notion of its origins predating the Civil War). In each case the otherwise beautiful object is twisted and broken beyond repair, eschewing any notion of the restoration of perfection. Benjy may be quieted for a moment in each case that he is given something to grasp onto, but inevitably, the almost bestial pain will reemerge in his moaning.

We are also given a clear indication the end that Benjy is Faulkner’s diagnoses for the southern psyche in general. The final incident takes place in a square, a place not only public outside of the confines of the family compound and its gates, but deliberately centered on the monolithic stature of a confederate soldier. “Get to hell on home with him. If you ever cross that gate with him again, I’ll kill you!” (320) Jason is heard threatening Luster. The threat is meant to protect the family from shame in what appears to be an otherwise sacred place, but symbolically, Jason is not only forcing Luster return Benjy back behind the physical gates of the Compson estate, but he is also attempting to suppress an ugly truth that does not conform to his sense of self. But as TSAF  has demonstrated before, the reader knows that this suppression is only temporary, and the entropic force of unspoken past will reemerge to show the futility of attempting to control one’s own history.

As I make my way through The Sound and the Fury, I remain interested in the way the novel depicts a climate of social and racial order, specifically with regard to notions of humanity. TSAF is saturated with metaphorical and rhetorical comparisons and imbalances that frame social and racial valuation of individuals within the context of humanity. The representation of humanity in TSAF operates in two ways: it offers a rubric for parsing modern liberal notions of humanity, and perhaps paradoxically — through the invocation of difference — it creates conditions of possibility for reframing those notions. This is most coherently materialized through our understanding of the Compson’s social and racial ideology; that which originates within their nuclear family, yet extends far beyond that familial order.

Mrs. Compson is obsessed with isolating deficiencies in the Compson bloodline. Her argument for the superiority of her maiden Bascomb blood is also an argument for its ultra-humanness. Yet at the same time, Mr. Compson makes similar distinctions via a rubric of racialized humanity. Speaking of Mrs. Compson’s brother he said, “I admire Maury. He is invaluable to my own sense of racial superiority” (43). While I remain unclear as to why Mr. Compson addresses Maury in the context of race, what resonates with me is his invocation of “racial superiority”. Additionally, we know Jason is notorious for stripping both women and black people of their humanity, actively seeking to render them less-than-him, less-than-man, less-than-white, and ultimately less-than-human.

Yet, if Jason’s language and actions denote difference and deny humanity, the repetitiveness and ease with which he performs such actions reinforce a paradoxical crux of humanity. This paradox resonates with Lloyd Pratt’s ideas on humanity in his essay “To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice”. Speaking specifically of slavery, Pratt argues that in suggesting slaves (or, in the context of TSAF, Dilsey and her family as post-bellum laborers whose domestic servitude functions in the shadow of slavery) fought for the recognition and preservation of their own humanity, “we are separating a normative and aspirational notion of humanity from the sorts of exploitation and violence that history suggests may well be definitive of human beings” (2). Perhaps Dilsey’s chapter brings both the framework for “aspirational” humanity and its violent paradoxes to our attention most effectively. Her dismissal of Jason’s treatment of Caddy exhibits the framework for a “human/inhuman” binary. Dilsey says, “You’s a cold man, Jason, if man you is… I thank de Lawd I got mo heart dan dat, even ef hit is black” (208). Here, Dilsey reframes racial difference not just as a way to reaffirm the humanity within her “black” heart, but also to affirm the inhumanity in Jason’s white heart.

At the same time, TSAF culminates in Dilsey’s “ricklickshun”, or recollection. This experience bridges the distance between violence and humanity forged by normative notions of egalitarian freedom. Jason’s violent search for Quentin is cross-cut with Dilsey’s experience of an impassioned sermon that (violently?) narrates the crucifixion of Jesus. In this sense, Jason’s violent pursuit of Quentin is limned with a history of religious, racialized violence. As such, Dilsey’s “ricklickshun” illuminates violent “histories of perpetration,” histories Pratt claims we have separated ourselves from in pursuit of “simple-minded notions of moral progress” (2). Most importantly, TSAF’s climax offers a paradigm for understanding that the rubric through which humanist traditions decipher and denote humanity is in fact racialized.

So perhaps the intersection I’m most fascinated by is that of humanity and race, arguably the point at which liberal evaluations of egalitarianism and humanity appear to dissolve within the text. Ultimately, how can we imagine TSAF as a model for sidestepping the “human/inhuman” binary that underwrites humanist traditions, and how can we recognize strategic iterations of social and racial difference that work to interrupt these racist ordering systems.  

Works Cited:

Pratt, Lloyd. “To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice.” The Boston Review, 26 October 2016.

Molly Gendelman
Professor Allred
Blog #2

Jason Who?

I was torn over whether I could like the character Jason. One part of me disliked the character Faulkner made him exactly out to be: Cruel, manipulative, and apathetic. The other part of me felt nothing but sympathy for a guy left alone to deal with “caring” for the family. Of the four Compson children, it feels like he got the least attention. Benjy is mentally ill, Caddy is the only girl, and Quentin is smart enough/special enough to be sent to Harvard. He is rarely mentioned in Benjy’s and Quentin’s sections, and the mother only seems to give attention to him when he is older and she becomes more dependent on him. So his quiet, cutthroat demeanor does not come as a big surprise to me.
His section is all about him, his sufferings, his misfortunes, etc. He only speaks of Benjy to complain about him being an embarrassment and another mouth to feed. He barely mentions Quentin (his brother), so initially I thought he really does not think much about his brothers. But then one line stuck out to me, “Sometimes I think what’s the use of anything. With the precedent I’ve been set I must be crazy to keep on” (235). It immediately reminded me of both Benjy and Quentin, how they were “crazy” in their own separate ways. This is in a stream of consciousness, thoughts not said out loud, and I think he references his brothers without even knowing it.
His relationships with Caddy and Quentin (his niece) are complicated for me to understand. He tries to make it clear he hates that he has to support Quentin, even though he keeps the money Caddy sends specifically for her. Her actions only anger him if he thinks they’ll reflect poorly on him, and from his perspective it does seem like she is a handful. At the same time, he was still put in charge of caring for her, in addition to his mother, his dying father, Benjy, the servants, and Uncle Maury who is always taking money from his mother. I can see why he has such a hard outer shell, so I am empathetic to some of his anger, but Faulkner did an extremely good job of making Jason’s character unlikeable. At several points throughout his section I found myself thinking that something might be mentally wrong with him, similar to his brothers, but unlike them he is able to function with it. He is extremely paranoid, and this can be seen clearly on page 233: “Like a man would naturally think, one of them is crazy and another one drowned himself and the other one was turned out into the street by her husband, what’s the reason the rest of them are not crazy too. All the time I could see them watching me like a hawk, waiting for a chance to say Well I’m not surprised I expected it all the time the whole family’s crazy.” Perhaps he is aware there is a similarity between himself and his brothers, despite how hard he tries to deny and hide it.  In the end I am still not sure what to think of Jason’s character, but maybe Faulkner wanted that reaction on purpose.

The Sound and the Fury indeed ends with ‘sound’ and ‘fury’ with the outburst of Jason’s fury to find Queenie with Luster and Benjie at the boneyard after his long search for her . He set aside all constraints and “with a backhanded blow he hurled Luster aside and caught the reins and sawed Queenie about and doubled the reins back and slashed her across the hips.He cut her again and again , into a plunging gallop.” ( 320) The repetition of Jason’s blows expresses the amount of fury he carried within. Amid all this Benjy could only translate his agony into a hoarse roar which he only puts to an end when ” the broken flower drooped over his fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again.”(321) Could William Faulkner have intentionally chosen this ending to focus on the fury that each member of the Compsons’ experienced and expressed differently? or Had he maneuvered to shed light on the normalcy and serenity that is only achieved with the crushing of broken souls as represented by the broken flower’s soothing effect on Benjy? It is interesting to refer to Benjy’s Red-Letter Days with Randy Boyagoda’s view of the novel “the novel both reveals and embodies the jagged, individual experiences of modernity’s ironic provision for us all: an intense awareness of the particulars of each our own time and place, shot through with fearful unknowing about how these particulars fit together, about if they even can, or should, and why.”

Jason’s section can give us some answers ; it sheds light on the life and thoughts of a typical southerner in the 1920s. In fact, his section is entitled April Sixth, 1928 which is only two days apart from the last section April Eighth. His views and actions towards minorities are clear from the start and his sense of his male white supremacy renders him legitimacy. Racial discrimination is greatly present  through “When people act like niggers, no matter who they are the only thing to do is treat them like a nigger.”(181), “I have a position in this town, and I’m not going to have any member of my family going on like a nigger wench.”(189) and ” What this country needs is white labor. Let these dam trifling niggers starve for a couple of years, and then they’d see what a soft thing they have.”(191). Not only does he verbally and at the end physically attack African American, he is also intolerant with religious discrepancies “Well, I reckon those eastern jews have got to live too. But I’ll be damned if it hasn’t come to a pretty pass when any dam foreigner …can come and take money right out of an American’s pockets.” All in All Jason’s personality as ‘anti-minorities’ can be easily traced through this section and even continues to the final section.

Power and Wealth are the two key factors in his life. He was always known from the first section to keep an eye on money and his alleged bank offer job was referenced to in the second, but this only builds up to increase his fury in the third section with the money spent on Quentin’s Harvard Fees ” Selling land to send him to Harvard and paying taxes to support a state University.”(233)  and the power lost with his sister and her daughter’s bad reputation as he says ” You already cost me one job; do you want me to lose this one too?” (206) and ” to make her name and my name and my Mother’s name a byword in town”(233) Thus, his mother’s idea of suffering for her children “But it’s my place to suffer for my children…I can bear it” goes disregarded and Caddy’s pleads to see her daughter are refused and we are left with Caddy’s words  about him “You never had a drop of warm blood in you.”(209)

If Jason embodies most of the Compsons’ fury, can we regard Benjy as the epitome of a crushed soul ? His only means to express sorrow, need or warmth is through smell and sound which intensifies at the last episode to become constant wailing and bellowing. This shrieking sound can be considered as the only retaliation of the helpless crushed souls in front of the southern power. Caddy leaves and yields to Jason’s will of not seeing her daughter, the girl is to be summoned at anytime to the breakfast table  although they are all aware of Jason’s slogan ” Little enough room for pride in this family”. It feels that all the family members are forced to continue this fraternal facade and even if Jason is “thinking bitterly of his father’s memory”(226) and Caddy has to consider ” your mother has had a misfortunate life too”(229), yet the Compsons have to still be ” because like I say blood is blood.” (243) Benjy is just an exception of this fatal line ; the line which tightens around Jason till the end “He could see the oppose forces of his destiny and his will drawing swiftly together now.”(307) Does the ending raises destiny over will? or does Faulkner’s sound empowerment of crushed souls predict the rise of future opposing forces, especially with the church setting and the priest’s voice “sounding like a white man”(293) and then “his intonation, his pronunciation , became negroid”(295) ? and what if Benjy’s character didn’t exist; will TSAF have a stronger effect without his sensory translation of feelings and events? or as mentioned in the above linked article , does Faulkner  proposal of using different-colored inks as a way to make Benjy’s section more accessible, with distinct shades assigned to its crisscrossed time-settings highlight the importance of his presence in the novel? We can further dwell on this idea and follow Faulkner’s manner of postponing his colored inks for further use  “I’ll just have to save the idea until publishing grows up to it,” he swaggered in an editorial exchange.

The difference between Jason and his brothers is that Jason blames his unhappiness on others, as opposed to Quentin who realizes that the faults in his life are his own doing (which is why he takes his own life as opposed to taking another’s). Jason hates- and I know that sounds too simple for him, but I don’t think he is such a complex character. While reading his narrative, there is no depth or any kind of true introspection that is seen. The chapter starts off with him saying “Once a bitch, always a bitch” and the same line is repeated in the last paragraph of this section. This shows the circularity and single mindedness of Jason as a character. This narration is from his point of view, and there was nothing substantial, or redeemable about him. All there is is blame, hatred, regret, and greed. Jason blames Caddy for his failures, and his own inability to have a successful career. Even as a child he is a horrible person,  Caddy saying, “No, she says. “I know you. I grew up with you”(204). In this interaction, and in Caddy’s hesitance to trust Jason with anything, we see that his character hasn’t changed much since he was a child.

This inability to evolve of better oneself reminds me of McTeague, and the characters seen in Frank Norris and the Naturalist movement. Naturalist literature is the idea that the characters within a given work are governed by their instincts and passions. Characters in a naturalist style written novel have no choice in the way they act, and what events happen to them. According to the naturalist writer, everything is predetermined. McTeague is trapped in the predetermined, and stifling image that Norris has given him- stupid, antisocial. His efforts to change, to better himself, to become a functioning member of society, all turn on him. His profession is ripped away, his marriage falls apart, his one friendship is poisoned by jealousy. What this work possesses, and what is seen in Jason, are characters that are limited in their choices due to class or biological/ heredity differences, and the social constructs that follow that. Humans are born a certain gender, or race; they are born into a certain family with a certain economic background. All of these factors narrow the amount of free will a person can exercise and lessens their chances of succeeding. The naturalist writer paints a very morbid, albeit very real, picture of society and human nature. Part of being a dynamic character- like Caddy or Quentin- is that the reader gets to see some sort of evolution. The beauty of a novel like this is that the reader gets to see a family from childhood to the present. This offers the ability to introduce new sets of problems and concerns that arise while people grow up. We see this evolution with Caddy- in her promiscuity and realization of her sexuality- and we see it in Quentin from the carefree nature of his childhood to his anxiety ridden adulthood. But there is no change for Jason. He remains stuck in his ways, unable to make any kind of true progression.