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.