The Sound And The Fury Essay Research

The Sound And The Fury Essay, Research Paper

In the short monologue from William Shakespeare.s tragedy, Macbeth, the title character likens life to a .tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.. Benjy, a thirty-three year old idiot, begins to relate William Faulkner.s unfortunate tale of the Compson family in The Sound and the Fury. Just as it is a story told by an imbecile, it is one characterized by .sound. and .fury.. Benjy.s meaningless utterances and reliance on his auditory senses, the perpetual ticking of clocks, Quentin.s mysterious bantering, the insignificant accompaniment. Jason.s lust for power and control, the inescapable nemesis of time, Miss Quentin.s rebellious attitude. The Compson family in its entirety is that .poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage.. Their lives are so full of worries, confusion, sound, and fury that life becomes short and unimportant, signifying nothing. However, Faulkner.s The Sound and the Fury is not limited to any one point of view, even to that of Benjy. By delivering his novel from four entirely different perspectives, Faulkner is able to create an intricately woven plot that centers on the only Compson daughter, Caddy, and allows one to crawl inside the minds of his deeply disturbed characters. April seventh, nineteen-hundred-and-twenty-eight.or is it. Benjamin, formerly Maury, presents a disjointed account of his life between his early childhood just around the turn of the century and up until 1910, mainly focusing on his relationship with his sister, Candace. His sense of time is nonexistent: he confuses the past with the present. He is literal: he has no knowledge of connotation. His descriptions are that of a small child and represent the world as it might seem to a person who has been cut off from all things civilized. One of Benjy.s most vivid memories is drunkenness: ..I ran into the box. But when I tried to climb onto it it jumped away and hit me on the back of the head and my throat made a sound. (Faulkner 40). His interpretations, in general, are simplistic and this is clearly reflected in the way he describes his experience with alcohol. The loss of control that is associated with inebriation is new to Benjy, and he doesn.t understand that his judgement is impaired and the champagne he consumed has altered his perception of the world. Instead, he only understands that the ground is moving beneath him.he believes what he sees. .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. (Faulkner 72). Benjy relies heavily on his senses, especially sight, smell, and touch. He associates sight with the knowledge that an object is present, which is how .sees. with his hands, he knows the slipper is there, but he can.t physically see it. Because of this, Benjy appreciates beauty and color and light, which is evident in his fascination with fire. It is also understood that this slipper belonged to his sister and serves as a sort of security blanket. One understands that Benjy tells his story without adding any intelligent interpretation, allowing one to witness the evolution of the Compson family through the eyes of a simpleton while laying down the framework of the plot, however confusing it may seem. If Benjy fails to analyze events around him, Quentin overanalyzes them. He concentrates on time and constantly tries to escape time, which he eventually discovers is inevitable. His dark, mysterious narration is centered about the events leading up to 1910, and places emphasis on his desire to preserve his sister.s innocence as well as his role as the .walking shadow. of the Compson family. .The shadow hadn.t quite cleared the stoop. I stopped inside the door, watching the shadow move. It moved almost imperceptibly, creeping back inside the door, driving the shadow back into the door. (Faulkner 81). Quentin dwells on darkness and encloses himself in shadows. These shadows have a way of preventing him from forgetting that time is constantly looming over him, like a dark cloud that reminds him, as well as the reader, that time does exist, and idea that contradicts Benjy.s treatment of chronology. Despite his fascination with the persistence of time, Quentin loved only one thing. As noted in the epilogue, he .loved death above all.loved only death, loved and lived in a deliberate and almost perverted anticipation of death. (Faulkner 336). Because of Quentin.s obsession with darkness, morbidity, and death itself, his point of view is almost futuristic. Day by day, he lives in anticipation, anxious for the day when his biological clock will cease to tick away the minutes of his unfortunate existence. Quentin.s dark point of view contrasts sharply with that of Benjy, and thus weaves another strand into Faulkner.s intense lattice. Jason Compson presents the first sequential narration in this novel and, by doing so, establishes the fact that he is (or tries to be) in control of all around him. After his father.s death, he took on the role as the man of the house and, in comparison with his suicidal and idiot brothers and his promiscuous sister, seemed to be the only child with any direction or common sense. In the appendix, Faulkner characterized Jason as .the first sane Compson since before Culloden and (a childless bachelor) hence the last. (Faulkner 342). Jason is the