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.