The way that the novel reveals the nature of war through the eyes of the boys Bayard and Ringo indicates that, for them, war is a belief rather than an event.  Their understanding of war depends on what others tell them or on mere word associations rather than on experiential knowledge.  The narrator claims, “So we knew a war existed; we had to believe that, just as we had to believe that the name for the sort of life we had led for the last three years was hardship and suffering.  Yet we had no proof of it” (U 94).  By likening his belief in the war to his belief in the word for type of lifestyle he leads, the narrator indicates the process by which he comes to know grand concepts such as war and lifestyle.  This textual moment shows that the boys rely on the fundamental learning process of association, a process in which words gain meaning when they are linked to known objects, in order give meaning to the descriptive terms “hardship” and “suffering.”  The comparison in the quote above indicates that this is the manner by which the boys come to form associations with the term war.

The narrator indicates the tenuous nature of this learning process, which relies upon a teacher or informed individual to make connections between word and object for the learner, when he states that he “had to believe.”  The young narrator must trust what he is told about the link between the terms “sort of life” and “hardship” and “suffering” since he lacks the experience and evidence to claim otherwise.  Likewise, Bayard and Ringo “had” to believe that a war existed since they lacked a prior conception of the word war and must trust others to make this connection for them.  In this way, their knowledge of war constitutes an act of faith both in the individual who conveys the knowledge and in the fragment of knowledge conveyed.

To complicate matters, the intangible nature of war and the boys’ distance from actual battle makes it a more difficult concept to comprehend.  Like the connection between “hardship” and “sort of life,” the word war gains meaning when it is linked to evidence of its existence.  Such evidence might consist of returning injured soldiers, the presence of Union troops, the burning of houses, and the march of African Americans.  Nonetheless, because this evidence can be explained by other incidents besides war, it does not necessarily constitute definitive proof of war for the narrator.  For example, he points out that he saw men return “home with actual arms and legs missing.  But that was it: men had lost arms and legs in sawmills” (U 94).  The skepticism expressed by the narrator reveals that the war that he knows exists, exists in idea and not necessarily in concrete evidence.  The indefinite nature of such evidence is what leads him to claim that “we had no proof of it.”  When the narrator claims that “we knew a war existed” but qualifies this claim with the phrase “Yet we had no proof of it,” he reveals that his knowledge of this concept is based on a system of belief that is supported by knowledge provided to him by others rather than by personal experience.

Furthermore, the changes in the father’s appearance from one who exudes victory to one racked by defeat stretches the narrator’s understanding of war in order to encompass both states.  In the beginning, the father’s smell of gun powder and his larger-than-life appearance indicate to Bayard that war is a glorious endeavor.  He formulates a connection between war and victory based on the evidence—i.e. the “odor in his clothes and beard and flesh”—that his father presents upon his return.  The narrator believes that this evidence is “the smell of powder and glory, the elected victorious” (U 10).  The connection between war and victor is later challenged when the father returns and his presence “seemed…to emanate a kind of humility and apology” (U 95).  This changed appearance unsettles the prior association that the narrator had formed with the concept war.  As before, the narrator must believe that war is the cause of his father’s appearance albeit a greatly changed appearance.  Such a change tries the narrator’s faith that a war exists.

In conclusion, the novel reveals that war is not a concrete concept or event for Bayard and Ringo.  It is a belief.  It is an intangible and invisible entity that they must believe exists because they are told.  And, they must incorporate inconclusive evidence into this belief in order to give it meaning.  The boys’ struggle to comprehend war points to its ephemeral quality which is expressed in the way it presents only through fragments and pieces of evidence.

The first four chapters of The Unvanquished follow Bayard Sartoris’s narration as he recounts his formative years. It is difficult to know, at times, whether he is telling the whole truth— something which he fully acknowledges and blames on being a child. His first remarks about John Sartoris’s intimidating stature and presence reveal Bayard’s idolatry of his father. But he quickly reevaluates his childish memories and paints his father in a more realistic light. “And that was it too; Father was everywhere, with a sapling under each arm going through the brush and briers almost faster than the mules; racking the nails into place while Joby and Loosh were still arguing about which end of the rail went where. That was it: not that father worked faster and harder than anyone else, even though you do look bigger (to twelve, at least, to me and Ringo at twelve, at least) standing still and saying, “Do this or that” to the ones who are doing it; it was the way he did it” (U 12). Bayard, as an adult, identifies real factors of his father’s position and character, which he originally missed. His stories, as told to the reader, are peppered with the reflective insight of adulthood. He picks apart his memories, trying to distinguish reality from fiction. All of which leaves the reader wondering—can we trust Bayard Sartoris? Or does the mixture of childish naivete and adult commentary create a narrator that is too unreliable?

Bayard acknowledges moments in which he missed the major details of the situation, such as when his cousin told them all about the railroad incident. “She probably told us the reason for it (she must have known)—what point of strategy, what desperate gamble not for preservation, since hope of that was gone, but at least for prolongation, which it served. But that meant nothing to us. We didn’t hear, we didn’t even listen; we sat there in that cabin and waited and watched that railroad which no longer existed, which was now […] for all of them who were there and saw when Ringo and I were not” (U 96). Indeed, it is unclear for the reader what actually happened with the railroad. A little research reveals a connection to a real Civil War locomotive chase in which the opposing sides raced for Chattanooga in commandeered trains, with one destroying the tracks along the way. Bayard misses these details and sees only the implications—the railroad tracks destroyed, which means that he and Ringo will not see a train come through Hawkhurst. This has a huge impact on his relationship with Ringo. Although Bayard arrived at Hawkhurst with the upper hand, having seen a train before, they have both seen the tracks and heard about the incident. Neither of them will see a train anytime soon and they are back on a level playing field. From this point on, Ringo seems to gradually gain the upper hand. Bayard watches Ringo take part in his grandmother’s subterfuge to steal and re-sell mules to the Union army. He echoes his father’s assertion that Ringo is smarter than he is and remains almost entirely silent throughout this section. It is almost as if he is leaving something out. Did Bayard try to participate in the mule-selling scheme, but was turned down by Granny? Did he even understand what they were doing at the time, or has he worked out the details as an adult?

When Bayard does speak up it is to dissuade his grandmother from going to confront Grumby.  “‘Then you shant go,’ I said, ‘I’m stronger than you are; I’ll hold you’” (U 152). Bayard briefly recounts his intervention before going on to deny it. “We tried. I keep on saying that because I know now that I didn’t. I could have held her, turned the wagon, driven away, holding her in it. I was just fifteen, and for most of my life her face had been the first thing I saw in the morning and the last thing I saw at night, but I could have stopped her and I didn’t” (U 153). Even with his corrections and adjustments to the story, Bayard Sartoris is an unreliable narrator. But those moments of unreliability are the most important to this story, because it is about fiction as much as fact. Bayard’s fictions reveal the most about his character and his motivations. The Unvanquished is less about the Civil War and racial injustice and more about Bayard Sartoris and his journey. His storytelling uncovers as much as the stories themselves. Here, there is an undeniable connection to the author.  “Faulkner’s life was all about stories— making them up, making them over, even making them true. As a child in Oxford, Mississippi, he was a famous storyteller, often spinning tales with more verisimilitude than veracity” (Porter 1). Much like his Bayard’s father, whose impact comes from the way in which he does things, Bayard’s character will be shaped by the way in which he tells his story.

What I enjoyed most about the beginning chapters is that the reader gets to see ideas that are heavy, through the eyes of a child. Through Bayard, the reader is forced to reevaluate the “glories” seen in war and gets to see Ringo as more of an equal to Bayard rather than a slave. John Sartoris is a very big presence in the novel, even when he is not physically there. For Bayard, his father was not only physically dominant, but “Father was everywhere”(12). Here we see one of those images that only a child can see and be apart of – the idolization of a father, especially one that has gone to war. Bayard took pride in his father, and although he doesn’t really understand the war, he knows that he wants his side to win. Bayard and Ringo have both been taught to root for the South, and demonize the Northern soldiers and their cause, “I don’t know what we had expected to see but we knew what was at once; I remember thinking He looks just like a man”(25). Right before Ringo and Bayard shoot the soldier (actually a horse), Bayard has this moment where the soldier becomes a man, rather than a representation of the enemy. Ringo especially is in a weird position because on one hand he feels connected the South and to the Sartoris family, but on the other a Union win can lead to his freedom.

The relationship between Bayard and Ringo is interesting because although Ringo is smarter, Bayard is born white, therefore in the novel, he is more superior than Ringo. But there is this reliance that they both have on one another in order to reach their full potentials. This realization, this unity, is seen at the start of the novel when Bayard says, “Ringo and I had been born in the same month and had both fed at the same breast and eaten together so long… Maybe he wasn’t a nigger anymore or maybe I wasn’t a white boy anymore, the two of us neither, not even people any longer”(7).  I think that this equality that is seen at the start of the novel, while both are still children, will eventually fade. Even during the mule scam, Bayard feels insecure about how useful Ringo has been. I think that as the boys get older, society and its ideas on race will get to them, and they will never be able to achieve the unity and the comradery that they had as children,“We- Ringo and I – ran as one, in midstride out of frozen immobility”(8). This moment reminds me of the moment in Nabokov’s Lolita when Humbert interacts with his double for the first time, saying “ he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us”(Nabokov 299). Much like the moment when Ringo and Bayard are running, they become indistinguishable from each other, further solidifying their bond.

In the final section of TSAF, “April Eighth, 1928.” we are met with a variety of third person character descriptions that paint pictures in both form and content. I will explore descriptions of and interactions between the women in this section and how they reflect their individual and joint habitual domestic lives. I was first taken by these descriptions in the section’s first sighting of Mrs. Compson, when she is calling for Dilsey from the stairs in the early morning: “In the other hand she held a red rubber hot water bottle and she stood at the head of the back stairway, calling ‘Dilsey’ at steady and inflectionless intervals into the quiet stairwell that descended into complete darkness… ‘Dilsey,’ she called, without inflection or emphasis or haste, as though she were not listening for a reply at all. ‘Dilsey.'” (267). The way in which Mrs. Compson calls for Dilsey is primarily described in what is not, rather than what is; she is “not listening”, “inflectionless” (267, emphasis my own) and the scene is complementarily riddled with passive undertones that showcase Mrs. Compson’s stationary self at the top of the stairs, the surrounding quiet darkness, and the apathetic calls to Dilsey in a chorus of blasé repetitions (that of Dilsey’s name, as well as Faulkner’s repeated use of the descriptor “inflection”). Faulkner solidifies this scene when he writes that her calls were “without inflection or emphasis or haste,” and it struck me that what is so powerful here is his insistence in the lack: her tone was not filled with, say, lethargy, apathy, or tiredness, for instance, but rather, without the aforementioned traits. Describing Mrs. Compson’s calls in what they are not perhaps mirrors her withering existence and ways in which she herself feels she is lacking.

Similarly, just three pages later, we get a passive description of Dilsey singing in the kitchen, before she is to be interrupted by Mrs. Compson. Faulkner writes, “As she ground the sifter steadily above the bread board, she sang, to herself at first, something without particular tune or words, repetitive, mournful and plaintive, austere, as she ground a faint, steady snowing of flower onto the bread board… and presently she was singing louder, as if her voice too had been thawed out by the growing warmth, and then Mrs Compson called her name again from within the house… calling her name with machinelike regularity” (270).  The continued emphasis on repetition that Faulkner showcases here, in both Dilsey’s tune and Mrs. Compson’s calling, seems to illuminate the types of daily interactions that occur in the Compson household. I think it is interesting that one can see how Dilsey’s song moves from what it is not, “without particular tune…” to what it is, “plaintive, austere…” until she is cut short by Mrs. Compson’s own song of repetitive, habitual need. Faulkner notes how Dilsey’s energy and song seemed to warm up with the room’s physical temperature, which also follows the active trajectory of the descriptions of Dilsey, mentioned above. These interactions are telling in regards to each woman’s relationship with one another, especially in how each short scene is characterized by inactive, repetitive details, and the physical inactivity that shrouds these interactions: they engage with each other in early morning darkness, or complete invisibility by communicating from different rooms of the house. Oftentimes, when there is talk of physical movement in their interactions, it is of stillness or great slowness, for example, of one of the many descriptions of Dilsey on the stairs: “yet descending the stairs with a sort of painful and terrific slowness that would have become maddening…” (268). Ultimately, the descriptions of Dilsey and Mrs. Compson are interestingly comparable and contain continual auras of habitual slowness, repetitiveness, and strong opinions towards one another and to the other members of the household.

“I must go away you keep the others I’ll take Jason and go where nobody knows us so he’ll have a chance to grow up and forget all this the others don’t love me they have never loved anything with that streak of Compson selfishness and false pride Jason was the only one my heart went out to without dread” (102). Despite Caroline Compson’s imploration for escape, her and Jason are two of the very few left at the Compson home after the others have gotten out (whether willingly or not). This circumstance reinforces the particular bond between the characters – one that Caroline created early in his life by declaring him a true Bascomb. Her differentiation between Compson children and Bascomb children appears in all three Compson narratives. We can assume that she reiterated this point many times, therefore isolating Jason from her other children and creating an us-versus-them dynamic.

Although Caroline doesn’t have Compson blood, she did birth all of her children, which constitutes them as family. She repeats the phrase “my own flesh and blood” over and over. Regardless of which bloodline they lean toward, Caroline can claim all four of the children as her flesh and blood. Jason being a full Bascomb and not having had children, cannot. His mother is his only “true” family. Benjy and Quentin aren’t his kin any more than Luster or Earl. It’s “us versus them”; Jason versus the rest of the world. And Jason is certain that the world is out to get him.

Jason highlights many disadvantages and setbacks that have shaped his life and led to his current position in the world. “Well, Jason likes work. I says no I never had university advantages because at Harvard they teach you how to go for a swim at night without knowing how to swim and at Sewanee they don’t even teach you what water is” (196). Jason connects education to identity and believes that people wrongly assume something about his character – that he prefers to work, over pursuing a degree. Yet, in his mind, he was denied the chance at a real education.

Even the setbacks in his life manifest as more than just unfortunate moments. “I says I reckon you’ll think twice before you deprive me of a job that was promised me. I was a kid then. I believed folks when they said they’d do things. I’ve learned better since” (206). Jason himself admits that Herbert’s proposed bank job may have been more fantasy then reality, but he still views the loss of it as something actively done against him.

And so, he suffers, He suffers:

• Being asked for money by Quentin, Lorraine, and Luster
• Working at Earl’s shop
• Driving Quentin to school
• A headache
• Not getting someone to put the tire in the car when he asked
• Having the air let out of the tire
• Talking to Caddy
• The smell of gasoline or looking at water, which both make him sick
• Running out of blank checks
• Being the head of the household and “responsible” for feeding everyone in it
• Waiting for meals
• Benjy’s bellowing
• Keeping Benjy at the Compson home and out of sight
• Losing money on the stock market
• Being “on the clock” at work
• The effects of having the show in town
• His mother’s constant meddling
• Maintaining the position as the only Compson child whose name hasn’t been a byline in town

Things are constantly being done to Jason, so much so that you must wonder whether he enjoys the suffering a little. He does identify this quality in Caroline – “Little they cared how wet I got, because then Mother could have a whale of a time being afraid I was taking pneumonia” (201). His own fixation on every little way in which the world is against him mirrors his mother’s behavior and influences his future outlook and interactions. Maybe he doesn’t want misfortune, but he expects it. Jason can find suffering in any situation and this tainted perspective parallels the way in which Caroline embraces the world.

Oddly enough, Jason and Caroline take turns being the sufferer and the suffered in their own relationship. At times, Caroline is the one on the losing end. “’To have people think I permit her to stay out of school and run about the streets, or that I cant prevent her doing it…Jason, Jason […] How could you. How could you leave me with these burdens’” (182). But mostly it is Jason who is dealt the worse hand. “’I know I’m just a trouble and a burden to you,’ she says, crying on the pillow” (181). “’I hate to do it,’ she says. ‘To increase your burden by adding Quentin…’” (219). The shifting burden represents the shifting leadership and responsibility for the family. Caroline relinquishes all power as she accepts Jason as the head of the household. He becomes a man, the leader, and less of her son.” ‘But it’s my place to suffer for my children,’ she says, ‘I can bear it’ (220).  A mother takes on pain for her children’s sake. Yet in their new roles, Caroline can only add Jason with more suffering and burdens.

How can you win if your own mother is working against you? She reinforces the idea that Jason is only like his father in name – they are not “flesh and blood.” By isolating Jason from his siblings at a young age, Caroline effectively isolates him from the rest of society. Her constant noise about burdens and suffering predisposes Jason to expect that from the world. If it weren’t for his mother Jason might have stood a fighting chance. But with her in his life he’s already committed to losing the battle.

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.