Comment on Faulkner’s use of multiple narrators in The
Sound and the Fury./Discuss the gradual disintegration of the Compson family in
The Sound and the Fury./Discuss Faulkner’s projection of a world of crumbling
values in The Sound and the Fury.
Faulkner projects a world of crumbling values through the gradual disintegration of the Compson family in his novel The Sound and the Fury. The Compson family is falling apart. The kids run wild, the mother locks herself in her bedroom with a hot water bottle and her Bible, and the father locks himself in the den with a nice big bottle of whiskey. In other words, life isn’t exactly the sunniest. Not to worry, though: it can always get worse.
The Sound and the Fury cycles through the first-person narratives of three Compson children as they remember their childhood, and mourn the loss of their sister Caddy. Benjy, the first narrator of the novel, is mentally-handicapped and the youngest son of the family. He spends his days wandering around the edges of the family’s small-town Mississippi home, listening to the golfers across the way yell for their caddies. To Benjy’s ear, "caddie" sounds a whole lot like "Caddy," and so he thinks about all the times that Caddy played a huge part in his life. Since Caddy played a huge role in his life fairly frequently, his memories take a while to develop. Time warps backwards and forwards as Benjy’s memory gets going: we get his account of Caddy’s fierce independence and her blossoming sexuality.
Just when we’re getting lulled into Benjy’s mind and memories, however, Faulkner switches it all up. We wouldn’t want to get too comfortable, would we? Chapter Two lands us smack in the middle of Quentin Compson’s life eighteen years earlier. It’s 1910. Quentin has left Mississippi to attend Harvard University. Sounds like a totally different life from Benjy’s, right? Well, yes. And no. Like Benjy, Quentin is obsessed with Caddy. Like Benjy, he just can’t seem to get her out of his head. Unlike Benjy, however, Quentin has an agonizing sense of how time is passing. Breaking his father’s watch in a frantic attempt to stop time from ticking on, Quentin begins to move through the last day of his life.
