The Sound and the Fury

“’Go on.’ T.P. said. ‘Holler again. I going to holler myself. Whooey.’ Quentin kicked T.P. again. He kicked T.P. into the trough where the pigs ate and T.P. lay there. ‘Hot dog.’ T.P. said. ‘Didn’t he get me then. You see that white man kick me that time. Whooey.’”

T.P. has discovered Mr. Compson’s stash of alcohol in the cellar, and he and Benjy are now drunk. This scene takes place during Caddy’s wedding, which will lead to her leaving and eventual exile from the family home. The reappearance of the pigs emphasizes the motif of loss.

“It kept on making it and I couldn’t tell if I was crying or not, and T.P. fell down on top of me, laughing, and it kept on making the sound and Quentin kicked T.P. and Caddy put her arms around me, and her shining veil, and I couldn’t smell trees anymore and I began to cry.”

Benjy recalls the scene again, this time from his personal perspective. His confusion is exaggerated by the alcohol, but it is also due to the ominous nature of Caddy’s wedding itself. To him, Caddy has always smelled of trees—she is always climbing up or down them—so, the smell is symbolic of comfort, shelter, and home. Now that Caddy no longer smells of trees, Benjy begins to mourn the loss. Not only has she lost her childhood innocence via her sexual maturation, but she will be leaving Benjy behind.

“They came on. I opened the gate and they stopped, turning. I was trying to say, and I caught her, trying to say, and she screamed and I was trying to say and trying and the bright shapes began to stop and I tried to get out. I tried to get it off of my face, but the bright shapes were going again.”

After Caddy leaves, Benjy keeps searching for her. He cannot understand—or, perhaps, he simply cannot accept—that she is not coming home. Thus, he walks along the fence where he used to meet Caddy coming home from school. Presumably, he approaches the local schoolgirl to ask where Caddy has gone, but he is unable to communicate his query. The girl interprets his eagerness as aggressiveness, and she is frightened. Subsequently, Benjy is castrated to prevent further aggression or worse. His inability to communicate leads to his literal impotence.

“Hush your mouth, Jason, Dilsey said. She went and put her arm around Quentin. Sit down, honey, Dilsey said. He ought to be shamed of hisself, throwing what aint your fault up to you.”

Jason has implied that Miss Quentin has inherited Caddy’s sexual promiscuity. Because Miss Quentin is an illegitimate child of an immoral mother, the argument goes, she will inevitably replicate such behavior. Dilsey, the housekeeper, tries to protect Miss Quentin, emphasizing that it is not Miss Quentin’s fault that she is fatherless and that birthright is not necessarily destiny.

“She smelled like trees. In the corner it was dark, but I could see the window. I squatted there, holding the slipper. I couldn’t see it, but my hands saw it, and I could hear it getting night, and my hands saw the slipper but I couldn’t see myself, but my hands could see the slipper, and I squatted there, hearing it getting dark.”

Benjy again remembers the innocent Caddy from when they were children. She has left behind a slipper that becomes a talisman to him, calming him when nothing else can. This quotation is also another example of synesthesia, where the sense of touch is commingled with the sense of sight and sound. Benjy experiences all these senses at once, emphasizing the rush of emotion that the connection to Caddy can induce.

“If things just finished themselves. Nobody else there but her and me. If we could just have done something so dreadful that they would have fled hell except us. I have committed incest I said Father it was I it was not Dalton Ames.”

The impetus for Quentin’s (false) confession of committing incest with his sister is two-fold. He wants to protect her from her family’s disapproval, and he wants to claim her for himself—even if it means committing sin so awful that it would leave them alone together in hell. It is also an example of extreme denial: Quentin does not wish to believe that Caddy would engage in sexual activity with another man.

“There was a clock, high up in the sun, and I thought about how, when you dont want to do a thing, your body will try to trick you into doing it, sort of unawares.”

Throughout his narration, Quentin is obsessed with time. He destroys the time-keeping mechanism on his watch (a family heirloom) and refuses to have it fixed, even after he approaches a shopkeeper to do so. He wants to exist outside of time, the slow grind that wears one down as Father would say, and he has decided that his time is up—he is embarking on a plan to end his life. Yet, he cannot resist marking the hours and counting the final moments of his life, like a man condemned.

“Only our country was not like this country. There was something about just walking through it. A kind of still and violent fecundity that satisfied even bread-hunger like. Flowing around you, not brooding and nursing every niggard stone.”

Quentin reminisces about the Southern country in which he grew up. That “violent fecundity” reverberates with his lustful feelings for Caddy that eventually turn violent: he holds a knife to her throat, threatening to kill her if he cannot have her. He is nostalgic for the sense of life flowing forward, rather than falling prey to the morbid ruminations he obsesses over during his time away.

“yes I hate him I would die for him Ive already died for him I for him over and over again everytime this goes”

When Quentin asks Caddy if she hates the boy who was her lover, she responds in the affirmative. Her protests are designed both to fend off Quentin’s smothering jealousy and to agitate him—for, of course, she does not hate her lover, only the consequences. She admits to multiple sexual encounters, experiencing the “little death” that is shorthand for climax.

“[...] she couldn’t see that Father was teaching us that all men are just accumulations dolls stuffed with sawdust swept up from the trash heaps where all previous dolls had been thrown away the sawdust flowing from what wound in what side that not for me died not.”

In his final stream of consciousness monologue, Quentin remembers Mother’s objections to Father’s point of view. In this jumble of thoughts, Quentin implies that men are metaphorical dolls filled with sawdust rather than thinking men of individual agency. They, like Quentin and Father before him, are trapped irredeemably by history. The last lines refer to Christ’s wounds, and Quentin suggests that Christ did not die for him. That is, Quentin believes he cannot be saved.

“[...] i think you are too serious to give me any cause for alarm you wouldnt have felt driven to the expedient of telling me you had committed incest otherwise and i i wasnt lying i wasnt lying and he you wanted to sublimate a piece of natural human folly into a horror and then exorcise it with truth and i it was to isolate her out of the loud world [...]”

Again, Quentin’s final interior monologue is a jumbled rush of thoughts. He remembers the conversation with Father over his false confession of committing incest with Caddy. Father does not believe Quentin has committed this act, nor does he fear for Quentin’s safety; rather, he tries to impress upon Quentin that he has overreacted to Caddy’s “natural human folly.” However, Quentin cannot divest himself of the connection; he wishes to save Caddy at his own expense.

“[...] its not despair until time its not even time until it was.”

Quentin’s obsession with time reverberates until the end. This line also reveals that, while Quentin’s decision to die by suicide seems well-planned—he distributes letters and buys weights to hold him down in the water—it is, at the same time, spontaneous. The despair that has been building in him since Caddy’s first sexual awakening bursts over once she gets married. All hope is now lost, as she is lost to him.

“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 dont even teach you what water is.”

In a complete change of tone, Jason takes over the narration in the third section. He is sarcastic and resentful at every turn and bitter over what he perceives as his lack of opportunities—opportunities Quentin had squandered. His recollection of Quentin’s death by suicide is both remorseless and disrespectful, which describes Jason’s attitude toward his entire family.

“I says it’s not that I have any objection to having it here: if it’s any satisfaction to you I’ll quit work and nurse it myself and let you and Dilsey keep the flour barrel full, or Ben. Rent him out to a sideshow; there must be folks somewhere that would pay a dime to see him [...].”

Jason is referring to Miss Quentin, the “it” of his sentence. She is objectified and de-humanized as another nuisance and obstacle in Jason’s life. He applies the same disdain to his brother Benjy, who is also objectified and de-humanized. He resents the burden of having to work to provide for the family.

“’You can say nonsense,’ Mother says. ‘But she must never know. She must never even learn that name. Dilsey, I forbid you ever to speak that name in her hearing. If she could grow up never to know that she had a mother, I would thank God.’”

“’Don’t be a fool,’ Father says.”

When the Compsons take in Caddy’s child Miss Quentin after Caddy’s husband has disavowed them, Mother demands that Caddy be cut off completely from her daughter and the family. Mother’s moral propriety has been threatened, and she fears the blow to her vaunted reputation. Father steps in as a compassionate voice of reason. However, as the reader knows, he will not live to protect Miss Quentin from Mother’s offended sensibilities and Jason’s wrath for long.

“Only be damned if it doesn’t look like a company as big and rich as the Western Union could get a market report out on time. Half as quick as they’ll get a wire to you saying Your account is closed out. But what the hell do they care about the people. They’re hand in glove with that New York crowd. Anybody could see that.”

Jason’s resentful rhetoric excoriates everything else in the world beyond his scope of control, not merely his disobedient niece and burdensome family. He feels persecuted not only by the circumstances that left him as head of a household but also by faraway events and business dealings. Nobody, institution or person, is left unscathed by his paranoia and narcissism.

“Only she couldn’t see into the door because the sun fell straight into it and it was like trying to see through an automobile searchlight, so I stood there and watched her go on past, with her face painted up like a dam clown’s and her hair all gummed and twisted and a dress that if a woman had come out doors even on Gayoso or Beale street when I was a young fellow with no more than that to cover her legs and behind, she’d been thrown in jail.”

Jason witnesses his niece walking down the alleyway with the man in the red tie. His moral contempt is scathing: Her appearance offends his outdated sensibilities. In particular, it disrupts his sense of patriarchal control. Her independence and disobedience are a personal affront to Jason’s sense of entitlement.

“I went out to the street, but they were out of sight. And there I was, without any hat, looking like I was crazy too. Like a man would naturally think, one of them is crazy and another one drowned himself and the other one was turned out into the street by her husband, what’s the reason the rest of them are not crazy too.”

Jason has inherited from his mother an exaggerated sense of pride over reputation. His reputation is more important than Miss Quentin’s safety or well-being. He wants to dissociate himself from his brother with a disability, his other brother who died by suicide, and his morally-suspect sister. He fears guilt by association, though his personal unethical behavior does not bother him at all.

“I says my people owned slaves here when you all were running little shirt tail country stores and farming land no n****** would look at on shares.”

Jason’s aggrandized sense of entitlement harkens back to a history long since passed. The Compsons were once a part of the wealthy enslaver gentry of the South that no longer exists. It marks him—and Mother, from whom he has inherited this privileged sensibility—as irrelevant, their values obsolete, and their privilege defunct and corrupt.

“’Whatever I do, it’s your fault,’ she says. ‘If I’m bad, it’s because I had to be. You made me. I wish I was dead. I wish we were all dead.’ Then she ran. We heard her run up the stairs. Then a door slammed.”

Miss Quentin finally erupts at Jason, who holds her hostage to her inheritance. He insults her mother, castigates her for her lack of a father, and insinuates that her immorality is inescapable and that she was born morally defective. She becomes what he has already decided she is. Yet, she will decide to make her own destiny.

“’I have to humor them,’ Mrs Compson said. ‘I have to depend on them so completely. It’s not as if I were strong. I wish I were. I wish I could do all the house work myself. I could at least take that much off your shoulders.’”

“’And a fine pigsty we’d live in, too,’ Jason said.”

Jason’s contempt for his family extends even to Mother, with whom he has much in common. Her weakness of character and passive-aggressive martyrdom have worn Jason’s tolerance down. Her helplessness is reflected in his own attempts to control Miss Quentin since he is ultimately ineffective there, as well.

“He wasn’t thinking of home, where Ben and Luster were eating cold dinner at the kitchen table. Something—the absence of disaster, threat, in any constant evil—permitted him to forget Jefferson as any place which he had ever seen before, where his life must resume itself.”

In his defeat, Jason cannot even imagine home. Miss Quentin has won; she has evaded him, and he has lost control. Home without his authority is not home at all; home wherein he is not thwarting disobedience, tackling disaster, scheming to recoup what he believes is rightfully his is not home at all. His future is irrevocably changed via Miss Quentin’s absence.

“Luster returned, carrying a white satin slipper. It was yellow now, and cracked, and soiled, and when they gave it into Ben’s hand he hushed for a while.”

Benjy still clings to the slipper that stands in for his absent sister Caddy. Its deteriorating condition reflects both the continuing march of time and the decline of the Compson family itself; only further decay and death lie ahead. Still, even in such condition, the slipper—and Caddy’s memory—is a source of comfort and a beacon of hope.