Mirea Florentina Oana Japanese-English 3rd year, Group 2

Seminar Prof. Ruxandra Radulescu

Stream of Consciousness in The Sound and The Fury

by William Faulkner

The Sound and the Fury, published in October of 1929, was Faulkner's fourth

novel--and clearly his first work of genius. The novel tells the story, from four different

perspectives, of the disintegration of a Southern family. The four parts of the novel relate

many of the same episodes, each from a different point of view and therefore with emphasis

on different themes and events. The first section of the novel is narrated by Benjamin

Compson, the youngest of the Compson boys and a source of shame to the family because of

his mental retardation. Narrated by Quentin, the most intelligent and most tortured of the

Compson children, the second part is probably the novel's finest example of Faulkner's

narrative technique. The third portion is narrated by Jason, the least sympathetic of the

Compson brothers. April 8, 1928 was Easter Sunday. This section, the only without a single

first person narrator, focuses on Dilsey, the black servant.

In this essay, I propose to analyze the stream of consciousness of Benjy and Quentin

and to make a comparison between the two parts.

The first section of the novel is narrated by Benjamin Compson, the youngest of the

Compson boys and a source of shame to the family because of his mental retardation. His

narrative voice is characterized predominantly by an inability to understand chronology or the

laws of cause and effect. This section is the most confusing and difficult for the reader. For the

most part, his language is simple sentences are short, vocabulary basic. "Hello, Benjy." Caddy

said. She opened the gate and came in and stooped down. Caddy smelled like leaves. "Did you

come to meet me." she said. "Did you come to meet Caddy. What did you let him get his hands

so cold for, Versh."(Faulkner,5).

For Benjy, time exists not in the traditional states of past, present, and future, but

rather as a chaotic mix of those states, creating the sensation that his life progresses in a

cyclical, rather than linear, motion. However, we are provided with clues that make it possible

for us to understand Benjy’s internal monologue. Whenever something reminds Benjy of the

past, his narration jumps to that past moment. With little understanding of time, Benjy narrates

his memories of the past as if they are happening in the present.Faulkner often signals these

transitions with a change of typeface (into or out of italics) and with references (to weather or

to Benjy’s caretakers) that mark specific episodes. For example, one representative scene is

that of his birthday, the day of his monologue, April 7, when his caretaker is Luster and after a

paragraph, the date shifts to December 23, 1908 when he was only 13 years old and his

caretaker was Versh.

Most of his memories are connected to his sister, Caddy, whose departure following

her marriage to Herbert Head leaves a void in Benjy's life. Because Caddy was the one family

member to provide Benjy with the nurturing love that he needed, and because, Mrs. Compson

does little else but whine about being punished by God for her family's transgressions, Caddy

was more of a mother figure to Benjy than Mrs. Compson. Through his monologue, which

often obscures the boundaries between present and past, Benjy reveals both a deep-seated

attachment to a past inhabited by Caddy and a desperate yearning for her return. Like his

companion, Luster, who is busy searching for a lost quarter, Benjy, too, hopes to find that

which he has lost.

Key memories regarding Caddy include a time when she uses perfume (1905), when

she loses her virginity (1909), and her wedding (1910). Benjy also recalls his name change

(from Maury to Benjamin) in 1900, his brother Quentin’s suicide in 1910, and the sequence of

events at the gate which lead to his being castrated, also in 1910.

Quentin Compson (1891-1910) is the oldest Compson son, he narrates the second

portion of the novel. He tells his story while attending Harvard, eighteen years before all the

other narrators tell their stories. While he is a sensitive and intelligent character, he is also

incredibly neurotic and obsessed with his sister, Caddy. His neuroses lead him to commit

suicide, something he plans to do shortly after narrating his portion of the novel.

Quentin’s section has flashbacks to fewer moments in the past and is less disjointed

than Benjy’s section, but because he is more intellectual and abstract, his section is much more

fragmented. His memories are often only hinted at by key words or phrases early in the

section, which are not always italicized and which are repeated and expanded upon later.

Quentin’s section is less difficult than Benjy’s, but it has its own unique challenges for the

reader. He is not waiting for a story to unfold or to happen; he is merely going over the things

in his life that have caused him to decide to kill himself. . As Sartre states - The coming

suicide, which casts its shadow over Quentin’s last day, is not a human possibility; not for a

second does Quentin envisage the possibility of not killing himself. The suicide is an

immobile wall, a thing which he approaches backwards, and which he neither wants to nor can

conceive. (269)

He begins his section by contemplating time, even breaking the hands off his watch

in a futile attempt to “escape” time and by committing suicide, he believes he will transcend

time. Another obsession Quentin has throughout his section is with shadows; the word

“shadow” is repeated constantly throughout his section:  When the shadow of the sash

appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight o’clock and then I was in time again,

hearing the watch. Quentin still feels pride in his family’s noble and glorious past, but he

recognizes that today nothing remains of that past; it is mere shadow.

As a result of his section, he is displayed as a thinking man, he is associated with

the intellect by his connection with school. At Harvard, he is placed in a psychology class, a

course that concerns itself with the study of the mind. His narrative begins with one such

memory of a rather philosophical discourse on the nature of time and the human attempt to

“use it gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience” (Faulkner 93). Quentin and his

father speak together of the nature of being: “Father said a man is the sum of his misfortunes”

(Faulkner 129) and “…Father was teaching us that all men are just accumulations dolls

stuffed with sawdust swept up form the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown

away…” (Faulkner 218) Although much of his section is a sort of inner dialogue with his

father, in which Quentin hopes to prove his father wrong, he seems to have taken quite in

serious his father’s sayings. In fact, Mr. Compson has told Quentin that as time passes, he will

forget his horror, which is unacceptable to him and so he escapes time in the only way he can,

by drowning himself.

Moreover, most of his flashbacks concern directly his involvement in Caddy’s

sexual maturing, but ironically, they depict also just how ineffectual Quentin is. In an attempt

to restore Caddy’s honor, he confronts Dalton Ames, the man who might have impregnated

Caddy, and because of one moment of distraction he is beaten by Ames; also in the present,

Quentin gets beat up by a fellow student because of something he said. Even though he loves

Caddy so much and wants to protect her from the world, he never succeeds.

Quentin’s vision of humanity is one of continual loss with no hope of recovery. His

thoughts continually return to his childhood and it impossible not to notice that the only happy

memories Quentin has are from playing with his siblings and black friends as children.

If we are to compare the two sections of Benjy and Quentin there are a lot of

differences, but also similarities. The similarity would be that most of their memories revolve

around Caddy towards who they have profound feelings.

Furthermore, the differences are more obviously noticed. One example is the flow of

events each character tells. Although Quentin is more logical his story is more disrupted than

Benjy’s. In his part, we are not even warned that the scene has changed as in Benjy’s through

italics or other indications. He wants to say so much that he mixes them too much. Benjy is

not as coherent as Quentin because of his being retarded, but here we have a clue when the

scene changes.

Another difference between the two characters is the notion of time. Being mentally

retarded and cannot differentiate between past and present, Benjy lives outside time and his

future does not even exists because he never thinks of it. This is why his section is so hard to

follow. On the contrary, Quentin is aware of time and because of that, he tries to escape from

it. One of his obsessions through the section being time and clocks. His streams of

consciousness make him to want to return to the past when Caddy was there too and had the

best time with his friends. He has too many problems running through his mind and in order to

escape time, he commits suicide. In terms of time if he were to change places with Benjy,

probably Benjy would not understand all the things happening around him, while he would

probably be happy not being concerned with everything involving Caddy and his life.

The other two parts bring us some better understanding of the events told earlier.

Jason’s section revolves more around the present, and although having just a few flashbacks

he refers frequently to the past. The focus of this part is mainly Caddy’s child, a girl named

Quentin who step by step takes after her mother. Here we find out that Quentin drowned

himself (the suicide itself was not depicted in Quentin’s section), that Benjy is a “gelding,”

that Caddy was divorced and that her daughter, also named Quentin, has come to live with the

Compsons. Other things, too, are revealed more clearly: Mrs. Compson’s hypochondria, Mr.

Compson’s alcoholism and nihilism, and especially, Jason’s meanness and greed. The two

main narratives presented in the last section are Jason’s pursuit of his stolen money and

Dilsey’s attendance at an Easter church service, at which a preacher delivers a sermon, which

stirs in Dilsey an epiphany of doom for the Compson family. As she says, following the

service, “I’ve seed de first en de last ... I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin.” (276)

Nevertheless, the parts complement each other and for a better understanding of the

events and streams of consciousness presented in the book, the reader must read them all.

Bibliography:

1. Anderson, John Dennis. Student companion to William Faulkner. West Port, Connecticut:

Greenwood Group,Inc, 2007. Print.

2. Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Random House, 1929.

3. Satre, Jean-Paul. "On The Sound and the Fury: Time in the Work of Faulkner."Faulkner, The

Sound and the Fury. 265-271.

4. Padgett, John B. “The Sound and the Fury: Resources.” William Faulkner on the Web. 17

Aug. 2006. Ed. John B. Padgett. U of Mississippi. 22 Apr. 2010

< http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/faulkner/r_n_sf.html>.

5. Anderson, John Dennis. Student companion to William Faulkner. West Port, Connecticut:

Greenwood Group,Inc, 2007. Print.