Final Post

The Sound and the Fury ends with no clear ending. Benjy does not cure his mental disease, the carriage does not reach its final destination and Quentin commits suicide. Somebody steals Jason money and he tries to look for it. Much like throughout the story, the mother never truly learns to truly love her children by the end of the story. This story takes place between 2-4 days but the story travels through time through the memories of the characters. This shows how incomplete the story is. The resurrection never takes place. 

Macbeth's quote "life is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing" means that Faulke sees nothing significant in this story. At the end of the story, the Compsons are ultimately defeated. It means that this story is ultimately written for entertainment purposes. So why were these different perspectives chosen to narrate this story? It was to show how connected this family truly was despite all their differences. The thing that brought this family together was Caddy. Jason and the mother both hated her while Benjy and Quentin loved her. The 4 different narrators are used by Faulkner to ultimately show that the downfall of the Conpson family ultimately aspired to nothing. This can be reflective of Faulkner's perspective of life and that it ultimately life is meaningless.

Jason

Jason is very different from all the other characters in this book. He does not seem to have a care in this world, but not in the good way. He only cares for money and does not care for the people around him that truly love him. His obsession with money can be seen when Jason takes money that was meant to be given to Quentin. 

Money is all that Jason can think about. He buys the gloves that his uncle Maury bought. This shows how material oriented he is because he bought these particular gloves at a funeral. He is also heartless. He even takes money from Quentin multiple times. Jason often tries to pay people off, like he paid off a mistress to stop writing to him. Jason is one of the few in the family who could really help out with all the money he has. He often neglects those around him and never gives money to the people who need it the most. 

Jason is very stressed throughout this chapter. All these problems come from money, his stocks, etc. If he were to focus on his family and less on his money, he would see a lot of his stresses go away. 

Quentin

When reading the Quentin chapter, I noticed many similarities between Quentin and Benjy. They both seem to be confused about themselves and their place in the world around them. They both seem to have trouble with their memories and the order in which they occur. 

Quentin has a particular obsession with time during his chapter. He personifies time by saying he can feel it.  This shows another similarity to Benjy, with Benjy saying that he can smell the cold. 

Also dealing with time, Quentin broke his watch early on in this particular chapter. When he breaks his watch it shows how there will always be an absence of time with Quentin. He then goes into a clock shop and wonders if any of them are the right time. This shows how he does not have a total trust of time. 

This was a confusing chapter because of the changes in time throughout the chapter but that is to be expected with Faulkner. 

Benjy

Benjy plays a very interesting role in this story. He is mentally handicapped and serves as the "idiot" of the family. I think Faulkner opens up with his chapter  because Faulkner wants to show an unbiased view of the Compson family. We would get a different view of the family if somebody else started as narrator. Another reason Faulkner opens up with Benjy is that Benjy does not care about time. Faulkner does not care about time either and Benjy is the best character to express this.

It is no surprise that Benjy is on the bottom of the Compson family. His view is pretty factual and we get to see what the Compson family is truly like. Benjy acts out of raw emotion, which can not be said for other characters. Benjy rarely lives in the future, just the present and a great deal of time in the past as well.

Benjy is an extremely nostalgic character. He lives a lot in the past, where he has better memories and a  better life. Faulkner can use this to relate to Southern life because the South is an extremely nostalgic society, especially in the time this story takes place.

William Faulkner

              William Faulkner is one of the great American authors. He was a small man from a poor town with big dreams. He grew up in Mississippi in a small town when it was the poorest state in the United States in the early 1900s. He never graduated from high school or college. None of these setbacks stopped him from winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949.

              Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, plays, poetry, and even screenplays. He mostly wrote about the South, specifically Lafayette County, where he spent most of his time during his life. This blog is about The Sound and the Fury which he published in 1929 as only his 4th novel. People did not respect Faulkner's writing until he released Sanctuary in 1931. Faulkner is truly one of the great American authors and best known for his Southern literature. Hopefully understanding these few things about Faulkner will help you better understand one of his greatest works, The Sound and the Fury.