Dilsey's Chapter

The final chapter is narrated by Disley, the house maid. Because she seems not to have any personal issues going on, her chapter is easiest to understand. The book slowly gets easier to read. I think Faulkner wrote it like this to challenge his readers. The book is like a puzzle, you have to put the pieces together slowly and you only see the final picture until you have all the pieces. It also makes it more satisfying in the end, because everything you were confused about finally makes sense, like the end of a murder mystery. For example when I used to watch Scooby-Doo on television I would be so relieved when they would pull the mask off and I would finally learn who the monster was. Everything would make sense. The third reason Faulkner writes like this is to show the unraveling of the Compson family while the story unravels. My final theory is that with the prominent and obvious theme of time, Faulkner may have wanted to show timelessness and emotion as well as the merging of the old and new South and how they have effects on society. Dilsey is the best narrator for this passage because she seems to have the most wisdom, can oversee everything, and when it comes down to it she definitely appears to be the sanest.

Jason's Chapter

Technically Jason is the most sane Compson brother. His chapter is written like any other book would be, with punctuation, grammar and sentence structure. However this doesn't make it any easier to read. I find Jason so despicable that I found myself skimming over the words just to get through this chapter. I think Jason is the most messed up out of Quentin and Benji. He wishes bad things to happen to others just because one wrong thing happened to him. He believes his own family is a burden to his success. His leading of the family is what shows that the Compson family is a wreak.

Jason likes to bully everyone around him because he feels sorry for himself. For example Lester wants to go to the puppet show in town but he has no money for a ticket. Jason has two tickets and tells Lester this but then decides to burn them in front of Lester. He also steals money from Quentin and his own family because he feels like he deserves it. He is racist and sexist. He believes black people are lesser and cannot do anything right. This is shown especially when he bullies the black man he works with at the farmers store. Jason does these things because he wants other to feel as bad as he does. He believes his current situation in life is not his fault. He blames everything that has gone wrong on someone else. He blames Caddy for losing his job at the bank even though he would have never gotten the job without Caddy in the first place. He blames his inability to get an education on Quentin because his parents would rather pay for Quentin to go to Harvard than Jason go to school. He blames his families embarrassment and downfall on Benji and wants to send him to an institution. His own mother is a burden to him. Jason spends his time feeing sorry for himself and stealing the money he thinks he deserves.

Some of you may wonder why Faulkner even added the character Jason into his book? There seems to be no point to Jason other than him being a jerk. However he is important because he help us realize how messed up the Compson family is now. The family used to he prestigious, they come from a long line of generals and old southern money. However now the family is run by a corrupt man who works in a farmers supply store. The old south is gone.

The second chapter of the Sound and the Fury is narrated by the second oldest Compson brother, Quentin. Although Quentin is eloquent in his language, as he is a student of Harvard, his chapter can be harder to understand than Benji's. For Benji things are black and white. He understands by using his senses and only can grasp concrete things. Quentin however has guilt, jealousy, anger and all the other complex emotions that every human experiences. On top of that Quentin is not in a healthy mental state while narrating. All of this can make Quentin's chapter hard to follow and takes dedication to read and decipher it.

Quentin seems to have an obsession with escaping time. He also seems to be escaping himself throughout his day. He never establishes a clear "I" to narrate the chapter. It almost seems as if Quentin is having an out of body experience. He is not focused on the present and what is going on around him but rather is obsessed with the past. For example when he breaks the glass of his watch on his side table he doesn't even notice that he cut his finger until he looked down and saw red. He is so out of touch with the present he cannot even experience pain. This makes for a dangerous and potential downfall. The past is consuming him. He wants nothing more than to escape the past and he feels the only way to do this is through suicide.

Quentin is going mad because of his frustration. He cannot do anything right. He cannot win in a fight, he cannot save Caddy, he cannot finish Harvard. No matter how hard he tries to fix Caddy's problem nothing he tries works, even after he tells his father he commits incest so he could take the blame rather than Caddy. He also can't solve the problem in his family or stick to Southern code. Quentin fees defeat and frustration which also is another factor to his suicide. He is giving up. Suicide is a way for him to escape himself and his past. 

The first chapter of the novel, Benjy's chapter, was very difficult to analyze. When I began reading I did not realize everything was happening as a present action, even if it was in the past. Knowing this I began to read more carefully and tried my best to differentiate between past and present. There is a ton of information about the characters and the Compson family as a whole that Faulkner hints at in this chapter.

I think Faulkner began with Benjy's chapter to get the reader off the mindset of time as a constant. He wanted the reader to understand that time is not a defining object in this book. The past and the present are all the same to Benji. He only understands change in physical features, not change in artificial things. For example he gets upset when Caddy is wearing a new perfume. He understood that something is different about her. Faulkner wants us to be able to read the book without getting caught up on the concept of time. Faulkner also put this chapter first because Benji has no bias towards the other characters. He sees things from the eyes of a child which means he is probably a pretty reliable judgement on character. Children tend to say exactly what they see and feel and this is the type of narration we are getting from Benji.

Benji may play a sort of a Christ role in the novel. He is innocent and pure compared to the rest of his family. Caddy especially recongnizes this innocence and purity. When Benji understood that something was wrong with Caddy after she was out with a boy, Caddy apologized for her sin and washed her mouth out with soap. She feels guilty and shameful for her sins around Benji. The other siblings have lost their purity too. Benji can feel this in all of the characters and it makes him upset.

Benji's chapter helps us understand that the Compson family is very dysfunctional. The mother only cares about image and cannot be bothered with her own children. She goes to the extent of changing Benj's name when they find out he is disabled and kicking Caddy out of the family just to save the family name. None of the Compson family treats Benji with compassion other than Caddy.

Benj's need for consistency and nostalgia for the past comes back to Benji's issue with time. He doesn't understand that time has passed and people have changed. He only understands Caddy is not with him anymore, but he doesn't understand why or where she went. Consistency with physical appearance is the only thing he understands. Without the consistency he gets scared or confused. His memories with Caddy are not things of the past, rather they happened and now they are not happening. This also relates to the family wanting consistency with status. They were once wealthy and affluent but the family name is slowly beginning to decline. The mother especially desperately fights for how it used to be. This is a symbol for the South after the Civil war. The Old South was full of aristocrats and traditional beliefs. New ideas and reforms came from the North but the South did not want to change its ways. Consistency and tradition is an important thing. The death of the Grandmother in the beginning of the novel parallels to the death of the Old South occurring during the novel.

Intro to Faulkner and The Sound and the Fury

ITs LIT haha. Jokes. SO funny. While we make a lot of jokes in AP lit and have a great time, its time to get serious. Lets talk Sound and The Fury. Whats up with that book? Before we dive into the book I am going to give you some background on the author, William Faulkner. He is considered one of the best writers ever, but why?

Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi. Although he shortly lived in Europe and Hollywood he spent most of his life in Mississippi and Virginia. He accomplished much in the literary world without ever graduating from high school, receiving a college degree and living in a small town in a poor state during the Great Depression. He exemplified artistic talent at a young age but became bored with school and learning at a young age. He later trained to be in the RAF but the war ended before he finished training. Many of his earlier stories were exaggerated stories about war. He talked about injuries and eventually wrote his first published novel, Soldiers' Pay in 1926.

He eventually enrolled at the University of Mississippi even though he never graduated from high school. While he was a student he would publish poems and short stories in the campus newspaper. He also wrote a one-act play called The Marionettes but it was never staged. He dropped out November 1920. 1921 he took a job as an assistant in a bookstore in New York City and then became a postmaster in 1922. He agreed to resign from being a postmaster because he was not very good at his job. He also served as a boycott master but resigned for moral reasons which probably included drinking. 

After moving back to New Orleans and falling in with a literary crowd he began publishing various poems and novels. His novels Soldiers' Pay, Mosquitoes, Satoris and tried to publish Flags in the Dust which was rejected by his publisher and others. He then wrote a novel that was strictly for himself. Its composed of four sections which are told by brothers of a single family. The four parts reveal the demise of a previously prominent southern family. Thus The Sound and the Fury was born.

Faulkner went on to earn two Pulitzer Prizes and the 1949 Nobel Prize for literature. Sound and the Fury helped his career take off.