Light in August is narrated in the third person, but Faulkner frequently makes this omniscient narrator feel like a present character rather than an inconspicuous storytelling voice. There’s a sense of fate in the instances when the narrator emerges from the shadows— as if to make us aware that the characters are living on the precipice of an inexorable doom. One of the first moments like this that stands out is in Byron’s meeting with Lena. She asks him probing questions about the man who goes by “Brown,” and as he thinks about his response, the narrator intrudes: “Byron is already in love, though he does not yet know it” (55). It creates an almost cinematic effect where time stands still and an objective truth (inaccessible by the people experiencing the present moment) is observed by some higher power.

This voice inserts itself into Christmas’s experiences as well. In chapter 7, as we see him navigate the McEachern house and plot his escape, the narrator transitions from an ethereal presence to a highly visible figure in his internal thoughts: “He felt like an eagle: hard, sufficient, potent, remorseless, strong. But that passed, though he did not then know that, like the eagle, his own flesh as well as all space was still in a cage” (160). Once again, this narrator makes its presence known when an unnamed tragedy or failure lies ahead. And Christmas’s tragedy, like Byron’s, is defined by the knowledge he lacks at this particular moment in time. Time and knowledge fail to meet at the proper points and Faulkner’s characters are left struggling to manipulate one or the other.

Interestingly, Christmas seems to have the power to penetrate the time-knowledge bank of this omniscient figure. He can’t access specifics, but he can sense danger like an animal in the wild (Faulkner makes several uncomfortable comparisons between Christmas and animals). In chapter 5, during his violent late-night encounter with Brown, he thinks to himself: “Something is going to happen to me. I am going to do something” (104). It’s a premonition that repeats at the end of the chapter: “Something is going to happen. Something is going to happen to me” (118), left without a period to officially end the thought or contain the moment. With these intrusive and foreboding thoughts, Faulkner is giving Christmas the power to (at least partially) transcend the temporal barriers that other characters are confined by. It’s an interesting narrative move — particularly in light of The Sound and the Fury, where again, the novel’s central Black figure Dilsey, is the only character who lives beyond the limiting first-person and painfully present experience of time. Whether these special sensitivities are racist animalistic depictions of his Black characters or empowering tools of agency seems like a worthy topic of debate.

Even though his narration was the most tricky to read, Benjy’s character crawls into my heart. In his narration, Benjy evidently has no perception of time and jumps from memory to memory whilst still “living” in the present. All objects, places, and experiences have the tendency to remind him and guide him into the memory such as a nail, a golf ball, the sight of flames, and more. Readers are able to collect that he has a disability yet what some may not realize is how much they could learn from Benjy when it comes to their own personal relationship with time. Day by day, people live in a sequential format because it is of course the norm, but could one argue that what makes life rich are the memories and experiences we endure throughout our lives? I make no argument against our current understanding of time and how time should lead us, but Faulkner definitely took his readers for a spin when giving us Benjy’s narration as the first of The Sound and the Fury. Benjy’s character and his ability to live solely through preceptors of different spots of time, allows readers to get the most of the Compson in just one fourth of the book. Although Benjy can see what is going on and live in that moment, he has no biases nor does he make any opinions, which allows readers to form their own as they get their very own first glance of the Compson family. I believe this was intentionally done by Faulkner. In Faulkner’s introduction for The Sound and the Fury, he explains that as he wrote this, he had no plan at all as to where the storyline would go. I believe that the jumbled-up events told through Benjy’s perspective is the product of that writing approach.

It is clear that no one really cares for Benjy, not even his mother who drowns in her self-pity could handle the fact that her son internally struggles. His sister Caddy, on the other hand, shows him warmth and care and seems to be the only one that does it. When he starts crying, she usually does comfort him. It makes sense that most of the memories that come up in this first section have to do with Caddy herself. I believe that these memories are what keep Benjy from being miserable as his family is constantly wanting to take him to an asylum. Any memory in which he can escape—so he does. As the memories unfold in the perspective of Benjy, readers are capitulated through a whirl winded journey that surround the moment Caddy had dirtied her underwear with soil this event was a foreshadowing of her later “dirtying” her family’s name (add to the reasons why her mother weeps). He had gotten upset afterward and the setting in which this event occurred never left him. Benjy believes that Caddy smells like trees. Later, when Benjy again smells the scent of trees he begins to cry. It reminds him of the underwear that were then dirty, and although she was told to wash off this perfume, he remained upset about it. Ultimately, Benjy understands that if Caddy were able to get involved with a man that it would signify that she would leave him which is why all of these memories make him so emotional. Despite Benjy having a disability and needing the care of so many more, he does not lack the intellect. He may work differently but the capacity remains strong in his character.

In The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner depicts the social, moral, economic, and spiritual decline of the Compsons, an aristocratic, white Southern family living in the early 20th century. The novel is set in an era of post-Civil War racial violence, a time in which modernization, industrialization, migration, and cultural movements are diversifying and changing the identity and landscape of American society. In an introduction to the novel, Faulkner describes a moving image that is central to its creation: “Caddy climbing the pear tree to look in the window of her grandmother’s funeral while Quentin and Jason and Benjy and the negros looked up at her muddy drawers.” In this highly gendered, racial, and allegorical image, Caddy is more than a young girl with a curiosity for the unknown. In this moment, she is a symbol of innocence and sin, progression and decline, signifying contradictory ideas that move beyond the act of a child climbing a tree. I suggest that in addition to biblical imagery, the tree signifies family lineage and history as well as a life force that undergoes cycles of death and renewal over time. The funeral depicts the death of a matriarch, and by extension, the lost legacy of the previous generation. In this case, the mud-stained drawers represent the inheritance of loss.

On the one hand, the “muddy drawers” foreshadow the shame that Caddy and her family face in the future, when her sexuality deems her promiscuous and immoral. The image of this sullied underwear is suggestive of lost virginity and tainted reputation, and by extension, notions of female honor and chastity. The socio-cultural context and historical factors surrounding the setting of the novel—as in, the patriarchal, racist, and classist ideologies that shape the post-Civil War era of the South—suggest that the female body, in the form of the white Southern belle, represents the ideals and anxieties of upper class, plantation-owning, European American families like the Compsons. Caddy’s muddy drawers allude to social, moral, and sexual transgressions that signify the decline of the Compsons’ honor, fortune, and glory. In many ways, the muddy drawers are as much theirs as they are hers. To each brother, the loss of their sister is at once the loss of home and family ties, the loss of traditional norms, values, and ideals, and most interestingly, the loss of capital.

Therefore, in this particular scene, which is a crucial memory Benjy frequently recollects, the characters occupy a liminal space between past, present, and future. The troubling fate of the Compson family thus generates a complex portrait of the South at a crossroad between the preservation of traditional systems in place and the adaptation to modern ways of life. Even In terms of form and composition, the novel shows signs of a departure from traditional ways of storytelling and a plunge into literary modernism. Faulkner articulates this shift through the disconnection and rearrangement of dates, events, and experiences based on memory, thus disrupting normative depictions of chronological storytelling. In Benjy’s stream of consciousness, there is the lack of a conceptual understanding of time. Due to this, the tension between tradition and modernity is almost entirely tied to the image of Caddy and the muddy drawers and the smell of trees—sensory experiences and images that exist in Benjy’s mind. As Faulkner himself highlights, Benjy’s nonconforming and fragmented narrative in the first part of the novel captures the entirety of the story, but requires a bit of “temporizing” and clarification through the other sections. Although the story unfolds over the course of four days, the thought processes and fragmented memories of each character gives readers glimpses into various experiences and times in their lives, highlighting the expansive nature of the past.

Whereas there is an absence of time in Benjy’s narrative, Quentin’s stream of consciousness depicts an obsession with it. In his narrative, Faulkner also explicitly highlights the destabilization of binary and hierarchical relations in terms of gender, class, and race. Quentin’s struggle to find meaning and truth behind the traditional belief systems and ideals reflects the clash between traditional Southern values and the forces of modernity and change, embodied most prominently by the industrial, urban, and cosmopolitan North. During his time at Harvard, Quentin is hyperconscious of clocks, watches, and “sound of ticking [they] can create” (76). At first glance, Quentin’s obsession with time suggests that he is stuck in, or rather, obsessed with the past. He yearns for an existence in which the pressure of time—of movement, change, progression, and decline—cease to exist. Moreover, his neurosis stems from the bleak future of his family, a future marked by social disintegration and economic failure. The clock itself represents the mechanization of time in an industrialized and modern society, redefining what it means to exist and be human. His anxieties, in this case, are multifaceted. Quentin is unable to make sense of the tensions between traditional ideals and the emerging values of modernism—one in which his identity and positionality as a white, Southern, Christian, aristocratic young man grows unstable.

More specifically, Quentin’s masculine, racial, and class anxieties are rooted in hierarchical and binary social systems that are collapsing before his very eyes, and this is best highlighted in his obsession with Caddy’s virginity and gender ideals at large. As the first-born male heir of the Compson family who is also studying at Harvard and attempting to take responsibility for his sister’s sexual transgression, Quentin carries the heavy weight of social and familial expectations. Having received a family heirloom in the form of a broken watch from his father, Quentin struggles to reconcile with the disorder that time and human existence represents. In fact, he describes clocks “contradicting one another” and restates his father’s words: “Clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life” (85). Whereas clocks represent mechanized time, a feature of modern life and industrial labor, time itself cannot be measured and contained within this framework. The pressure of time, a progression towards an uncertain future filled with failure, eventually causes him to take his own life. Quentin’s understanding of masculinity also plays into this notion of time, since it depends on his ability to provide for and protect his family as the Southern gentleman and patriarch.

However, Quentin believes that he has failed to live up to these societal expectations and gender norms due to his inability to “protect” Caddy’s virginity and honor. Similarly, Benjy fits into this framework as well, for his castration (also indirectly caused by a preoccupation with Caddy) signifies a loss of masculinity, sexuality, power, and patriarchal lineage. Just as Quentin loses the ability to carry on the family legacy when he commits suicide, Benjy loses his ability to preserve the lineage of the Compson and carry on the family name and blood due to his castration. Jason, on the other hand, also struggles with masculinity and preserving the legacy of the Compson family due to the lack of socioeconomic credit and capital. Unlike Quentin, Benjy is unaware of concepts such as time and Southern ideals due to his mental disability. He is also physically incapable of passing down the Compson family name, Jason on the other hand, is the opposite of Quentin in terms of his disposition and values. He is angry, bitter, cynical, greedy, and has no intention of carrying the family name. Miss Quinton, who is the sole member of the new generation of the Compson family, is born to the only daughter of the family. Interestingly, Dilsey is the only character who is capable of renewing, reviving, and rebuilding the legacies of the past into the future. As Faulker suggests, she is the “future,” and as Benjy recollects, she is the person who takes off Caddy’s muddy drawers and cleans them. There are layers to this representation of Dilsey, a Black woman who serves the Compson family and experiences oppression and marginalization due to her positionality but also sustains an elevated position in the narrative as a restorative figure.

In this manner, the overarching themes of time, tradition, and modernity are rooted in the three brothers’ fixation on their sister and her “muddy drawers”. The Compson siblings deviate from the implicit and explicit norms that shape their social positions: Benjy is mentally disabled and mute, Quentin is neurotic and suicidal, Jason is angry and bitter, Caddy is subversive and sexually liberated. The concept of time, which is weaved through the narrative in the forms of absence and excess, complicates the novel’s preoccupation with memory, history, and the past. Faulkner uses his experimental writing style, as well as the setting and plot of the story, to imply that behind the Compson family’s disintegration lies a deep tension between the traditional values of the South and the emerging modern world. In this context, intersections between gender, race, and class highlight how notions of power and honor are both regulated and destabilized by contradictory ideas of masculinity-femininity, whiteness-blackness, wealth-poverty. Each perspective in the novel suggests that these ideas do not fit within the binary relationship often attributed to them. Ultimately, the novel contemplates this challenge—the tensions between the old and the new ways of thinking that both emerge and dissipate with time.

In William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the Compson family has been hit with a series of tragedies that caused the former Southern aristocrats to sell portions of their land. Near the end of the novel, the family is financially struggling and the remaining members Benjy and Jason are ill-equipped and victims of a time long since passed. These two especially have been impacted by time and they are essentially tied down to this former plantation land. Their differing perspectives in response to time reveal an astonishing look into the Compson household and the circumstances that shaped these men.

Benjy, formerly known as Maury Compson, was born disabled and has had to be supported by his family members and servants since his infancy. He’s the embarrassment of the family and the only genuine affection he ever receives was from his sister Caddy. Benjy is a timeless person, his mind shifts back and forth from the past to the present. He receives little love in the present, he’s been castrated, whipped, and threatened to be sent to an asylum. His “time hopping” might be his only solace, his respite from his semi-abusive environment. Through this phenomenon, Benjy is transported to different moments both painful and joyful, he’s reunited with his dear sister Caddy. “Caddy held me and I could hear us all, and the darkness, and something I could smell. And then I could see the windows, where the trees were buzzing” (75). Its sensations like the smell of the trees and the gate make Benjy more unbound by his circumstances than his brother Jason.

Jason on the other hand is a man that seems physically tied to the Compson Household and “southern tradition”.  He is the third son of the Compson family and many of the opportunities he could have had in life were stripped away from him due to family tragedies. Jason has been left with the leftovers in life; he works at some meager store instead of being out in the city working stocks like the northerners. Jason thinks of the future constantly but he’s often missing opportunities that would guarantee his future. A poignant scene depicting this is when Jason is an hour late receiving a telegram that would have made him money in the Cotton Market. “That’s not my fault either. I didn’t invent it; I just bought a little of it while under the impression that the telegraph company would keep me informed as to what it was doing” (244). Jason takes no blame, and no responsibility for missing these opportunities, and it’s this dual nature between wanting to strike it rich and his role as the patriarch of the Compson estate that keeps him trapped in life.

Benjy and Jason’s opposing views of time reveal just how much your environment influences your perspective. Time plagues these men and they are intrinsically tied to the Compson estate. The Compson men are slowly decaying and they’re unable to change the course and remedy the end of the Compson family.

Quentin’s character is muddled, neurotic, and flattened across time as a prisoner rather than as a recorder (like Benji), catalyst (like Caddy) or refuser (like Jason). Where we expect a reliable narrator to take a stand, Faulkner gives us the solemn southern scholar who is tied to the past more than he is living in the present. I was really troubled by this character because while he felt well defined and fully fleshed out, he was distant, paradoxical, and his form broke apart on the page. For this reason, he is my favorite character — where the other characters are fleshed out, present, and discernable, Quentin is a slave to his experience, in a way that the very experience of waking up and checking the clock somehow relates to the ghosts of antebellum ideals which haunt him.

In other words, Quentin is a fragment of human experience. He is the mind at work trying to find a reason for its survival in a world which contradicts itself into violence. He is the conflict point for what the ideal southern caste system is supposed to be and what happens when the doors to its oppression are opened too wide. In fact, as he reflects on the disintegration of this southern illusion, specifically in regards to Caddy, we physically see him diminish into verse, where perhaps the most disturbing points of the novel occur: he resorts to suggesting suicide—“I held the point of the knife at her throat” (152)— or even incest— “I’ll make you say we did Im stronger than you” (149). Yet, Quentin’s violence lacks any sort of punch. In the sections where he threatens Caddy, his syntax becomes child-like and empty of power, and when he threatens Caddy’s lover, he faints. This violence which fills Quentin is devoid of any real release. 

As a cog, Quentin stands helplessly as the ideological pillars of his world fall to the ground– and take his family with them. He both resents his father and is bound to him, constantly repeating his nihilistic rants despite his innate need to repel them; he both desires Natalie and detests his sexual appetite for her in the face of gentility; he despises what his sister has done, even considering killing her, and yet his hate stems from his obsessive love for her. 

At the heart of Quentin is the paradox of any society — where marriage is driven by sex, it is considered a death for Caddy (“When they touched me I died” [149]), and the only way she can be saved is through Marriage, where another man may trade his protection for her virginity. He understands this structure that has been set and grows to know it is inescapable — even as a man, with less restraint, he recounts his play in the game while he escorts the lost little girl home. 

By the time we reach Quentin, he is already gone. He is consumed by his experience and role in a world of which he can find no real moral meaning within, despite the heavy emphasis of morality in his southern upbringing. The result is a shattered character, of which functions like a broken mirror as a reflector of a society which can not be totally summarized by a character of more normative syntax such as Jason. Even as we continue into the final sections of The Sound and The Fury, we are followed by these echoes of human experience which surround Quentin relentlessly into his eventual death, and forced to surrender to the weight of a southern illusion that has been broken through one intimate glance at The Compson’s. 

Jason’s anger in the last two parts of The Sound and the Fury seems to have as much to do with money as it does with family and honor. His brothers’ narratives obsess over Caddy’s absence, thereby demonstrating the profound effect the warmth of her presence had on them. Jason, on the other hand, can’t seem to think of her without bitterly lamenting the job opportunity he lost when her marriage fell apart. He holds this legacy over Miss Quentin’s head too, treating her as the personification of Caddy’s sin and using that as his justification to steal from the women. At the end of the book, he acknowledges it: “Of his niece he did not think at all, nor of the arbitrary valuation of the money. Neither of them had had entity or individuality for him for ten years: together they merely symbolised the job in the bank of which he had been deprived before he ever got it” (354).

If the financial aspect of the loss is so arbitrary to Jason, then why is his narrative so fixated on money? It seems that he wants to recoup his losses for the sheer principle of the matter, not because he needs the money. It makes sense that stealing from Caddy and Quentin – the perceived culprits of the life with which he’s so disappointed – would give him a sense of vindication. However, I find it interesting that his other route to recoup is through the stock market – specifically cotton stocks, noting that cotton is a “speculator’s crop” (219), and complaining that the investors, not the ones planting the seeds, are the ones who get the money.

Of course, the Compsons were never the ones planting the seeds, so Jason’s anger here is deeply ironic. As his family falls from grace and financial power, he blames the Black servants who keep his household together and built up its wealth, the Jewish immigrant bankers who help him invest, and the women from whom he’s stealing money. The scope of his bigotry and scapegoating are far too large to fully tackle in good faith here, but it’s important to look at its all-encompassing impact on his resentful attitude about anything involving money.

Now profiting off cotton as a speculator, Jason is combining two major historical elements of the North and the Old South’s economies – the stock market and the cotton plantations. In doing so, he is inadvertently embodying a small facet of the major economic transitions faced by the post-Civil War South. As the ‘Compson wealth’ dwindles away, he must look to new ways of making money, such as begrudging cooperation with northern financial structures.

Faulkner shows us this structural economic transition through the eyes of the angriest, most hateful character in the book, giving us a visceral look into the titular Fury. There is no neat path to national unity – and if there were one, Jason certainly would not be the one taking it. But as the new Compson patriarch, he cannot evade his role in the restructuring of the New South and its economic systems.

It is a shadow that appears first in Quentin’s section of The Sound and the Fury: “When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again” (76). Here Faulkner sets us up for a section replete with shadows, most importantly, Quentin’s shadow. Quentin mentions his shadow more than a dozen times throughout the lengthy section. His shadow only appears in his “present” and seems to vanish altogether at times.

Quentin’s shadow seems to be not just an extension of his body but a body itself. After recalling a memory of his mother, he starts “Trampling my shadow’s bones into the concrete with hard heels” (96). At other times he walks “upon the belly of my shadow” (96) and stands “in the belly of my shadow” (100). Since Quentin smashed his watch, his shadow becomes a way for him to slip in and out of time. In several places, he notices and then acts upon his shadow only after a clock chimes. Subsequently, it also becomes a way for him to keep time. He becomes a kind of living, as it were, sundial.

Though I don’t have enough space here to explore every appearance of Quentin’s shadow, I do want to discuss two extremes within the section. After a ship passes through the drawbridge, Quentin is standing on the bridge leaning against the railing. Several times before and after this section he mentions that he has tricked his shadow; in fact, at this point on the bridge, he says “so easily had I tricked it that it would not quit me” (90). His shadow is “at least fifty feet,” looming, “leaning flat upon the water” (ibid). He is unsettled not only by the size of the shadow but by the way “it twinkled and glinted, like breathing” (ibid). And Quentin says, “if I only had something to blot it out into the water, holding it until it was drowned” (ibid). He then sees the shadow of the flatirons wrapped up “like two shoes” (ibid). He considers the formula for measuring volume via displacement, but it’s not the scientific that’s at play here, rather the superstitious. “[They] say a drowned man’s shadow was watching for him in the water all the time” (ibid). It is the very life of his shadow, his past, his present, calling him to the bottom of the river. Drowning is the only way he knows how to conquer it. If we think of Quentin’s shadow as an instrument of time, then we can believe T.S. Eliot when he writes “Only through time time is conquered” (Four Quartets, “East Coker” l. 89). Quentin must pass through his shadow to escape the “mausoleum of all hope and desire,” the “reducto absurdum of all human experience” (TSAF 76).

The other extreme of Quentin’s shadow is its absence. When Quentin encounters the little girl in the bakery, we stop seeing his shadow. It is not until he is away from her, at several points, that it returns. She becomes his shadow. She becomes the physical embodiment of his past. She is constantly looking at him with “black” and “secret” and sometimes “friendly” eyes. She is always just behind him or just beside him. In fact, we don’t see Quentin’s shadow for nearly twenty pages once the little girl appears. When he gives her a coin and runs away, his shadow “paces” him and drags “its head through the weeds” (133). Then it is behind him. A few paragraphs later “The wall went into shadow, and then my shadow, I had tricked it again” (134). However, as he climbs and then descends the wall, the little girl appears again, and his shadow is gone. This is the last time Quentin’s shadow is noted. There is an instance after his court appearance where he and his friends are running from the courthouse and their shadows are “running along the wall,” but that’s it. Quentin’s shadow is subsumed into the frenzy of the group and is, we might believe, indistinguishable.

There are many other instances of shadow play within this section. We could take shadow far less literally and apply it to shades (ghostly) and the penumbral quality of the past. We could even make the case that the little girl is a microcosm of Quentin’s past: a chance to revisit and possibly correct what torments him so, or just a chance to relive the horror and validate his decision to die.