One last point needs to be made here. The Sound and the Fury was—in part—Faulkner’s favorite novel because it was his first great novel, the first true manifestation of the genius he had been so careful to nurture through his confused and apparently aimless early years. It was also his first authentic work—that is, the work which announced or affirmed what he was going to do for the rest of his life and had in it many of the elements of his greatness. But, finally, it was also his favorite novel because of his profound attachment to certain of the characters (Benjy, Quentin, Caddy, Dilsey) and because of the extraordinary centrality of childhood and a lost perfect time (that time when Caddy, Quentin, Benjy, and Mr. Compson were a true symbiotic unit) in the lives of at least these four Compsons.
The Sound and the Fury is such a dazzling, virtuoso, technical performance (still), that one is often distracted from a concern with what it is about (as against the sort of obvious and overwhelming fact of what it is doing). Naturally, it is about what it is doing, and much of the most illuminating criticism of it has focused on this, especially upon the movement in style and point of view from Benjy to Quentin to Jason to Faulkner, and upon the ways in which the novel tells the same story four times. The novel is also a kind of formal wonder, as all of Faulkner’s major novels are, and much of the criticism has explored the formal achievements of the novel. I want to address myself right at the beginning to what this novel is “about,” to what kinds of subjects engaged Faulkner’s imagination, to what “thematic” concerns lie behind his formal/technical accomplishments, and to what kinds of human problems draw Faulkner’s imagination to them.
From beginning to end The Sound and the Fury is concerned with the Compson family, precisely at the point where it finally lapses out of being. Unlike Absalom, Absalom!, say, which follows the rise and fall of the Sutpen family, The Sound and the Fury chronicles only the last years of the Compsons, the going out of the Compsons. The Appendix finished this chronicle by following it to the point where the original square mile of Compson land has become nowhere land; and the Compsons, like so many Faulknerian families, have lapsed into (or disappeared out of) history. They are gone. They belong to the past. Something internal to them, but never really explained (unlike, for example, both Absalom, Absalom! and As I Lay Dying, and Go Down, Moses—where it is explained) accounts for their destruction. The Sound and the Fury is about both the destruction and destructiveness of the Compsons.
Only the daughters escape, and they accomplish it both because they are highly sexual and use sexual means. The father quite literally drinks himself to death. The mother lives in a kind of camphor-filled room of illusions, unable, in one of the marvelous images of this novel, even to reach her hand far enough down the bed to pick up the Bible Dilsey has placed there for her; the elder son commits suicide after his first year at Harvard, the second son goes over to the enemy, to the matrix of values and commitments later embodied in Flem Snopes; the youngest son is born an idiot and ends up where Darl Bundren does—in the state mental institution at Jackson. Only Caddy, the inner mystery and obsessive concern of every male in this family, the focal point of her three brothers’ narrations, escapes—to what we are never really sure. Later, her illegitimate daughter, named for her dead brother, hardened, embittered, victimized before she is even out of high school, also escapes in a kind of ironic parody or travesty of her mother’s action. Like her mother, she simply disappears. Just as her mother tormented her namesake, so she torments the other brother, her Uncle Jason. All the men in this family are persecuted by the females, though it is not necessarily the females’ fault. The whole novel is narrated from male points of view and is obsessively concerned with females—with Mrs. Compson, with Caddy, with her daughter, Quentin II, with Dilsey. The only exception to this is in the fourth section where Faulkner, narrating from an omniscient third person point of view, focuses on Dilsey and, in effect, achieves a kind of limited third person point of view, though he never really goes inside (as he does with Benjy, Quentin, and Jason) and narrates from within that character. The women are all approached and perceived from without and from male points of view. If the novel can be perceived diagrammatically in terms of a circle within a circle, it is the women who are in the center circle and our only access to them is by way of the outer circle of men—brothers and sons, all of them, until Faulkner breaks up these subjective inter-familial points of view and takes over the narration himself.
Let us look at the Compson family, as a social unit, as we get it in this novel. At its fullest in the novel, the Compson family consists of the grandmother, the mother and father, an uncle on the mother’s side, the four children (three sons and one daughter) and one grandchild, Quentin II. Not actually part of the family, but as close (maybe closer) to it as family, are Dilsey (the “Mammy Barr” of this novel), her husband, children, and grandchildren. The family is clearly and decisively divided between the Mother and the Father. On Mrs. Compson’s side are Jason and the Uncle—exploiters, both of them. Benjy, the only son named from the mother’s side, belonged here originally by virtue of his name until Mrs. Compson rejected him, denamed him, and allowed him to be renamed from the father’s side by Quentin. On the father’s side are Quentin, Caddy, and Benjy. The grandmother—Dammudy—is on nobody’s side. The granddaughter—Quentin II—is on nobody’s side because she is rejected by everybody except Dilsey. Of all the children in the novel, Quentin II is the one who is the most completely without a family. Dilsey is on everybody’s side and tends to the needs of all the members of the family without any kind of favoritism. If the family has a mother, it is Dilsey. She nourishes, loves, protects, and comforts all the Compson children (including Quentin II); she tends to the needs of the Compson adults. If the novel has a positive center, it is to be found in Dilsey.
Mrs. Compson is a kind of anti-mother to all of her children save Jason. The family has no father comparable to Dilsey-as-mother. Only Quentin and Caddy have a father. Benjy has neither father nor mother. Jason is dominated by his mother; Quentin is dominated by his father; Benjy is dominated by Caddy; Caddy is dominated by nobody—in spite of the intense relationships he has with both Benjy and Quentin. Quentin II has no significant family relationships. She is the extreme example, and the last, of how the Compson family victimizes and fails its children. She is the last Compson: misnamed, fatherless, motherless, homeless, centerless. Benjy has no father. His keepers—always children, always black, always male—are his fathers. Caddy and Dilsey are his mothers. Quentin has no mother at all, not even Dilsey, it seems, since very little is made of this relationship. “[I]f I’d just had a mother,” he says at one point during his last day, “so I could say Mother Mother” (172). Jason has no father. Caddy has a father, but no mother. A daughter with no mother. A son with no father. A son with no mother. A son with neither father nor mother. Intense sibling relationships form, such as the Quentin-Caddy-Benjy one, or the Quentin-Caddy and the Caddy-Benjy one. Jason was always the excluded one. To say the least, the parent-children relationships here are tangled, and all relationships seem to be characterized by strange, often aberrant intensities—such as the Quentin-Caddy one, or the Caddy-Benjy one, or the Mr. Compson-Quentin-Caddy one. No matter how you look at it, once you get past the formal brilliance of the novel, one of the main subjects of this novel is the tangled motives intrinsic to the Family—or perhaps to the southern family, especially as we see them in the children. This was a subject which Faulkner pursued again and again: In Sartoris, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!, The Unvanquished, and Go Down, Moses,—to name only the main ones.
Here is a family which consists of three sons and a daughter—or, more accurately, of three brothers and a sister. The brothers tell most of the story here, each giving an account of how the one sister, the female, has dominated his life in some way. First Benjy, then Quentin, then Jason. Jason, of course, is almost completely surrounded and dominated by females—by his mother, by Dilsey, by Quentin II, and through Quentin II, by Caddy (still). The nature of the brother-sister relationships changes, of course: in Benjy’s case it is passionate, asexual love; Caddy is his mother, she loves him and comforts him; she is whatever is good in his life; when she falls, when she stops smelling like trees, when she finally leaves, he bellows. Caddy is the one who will get in bed with Benjy and comfort him by holding him in her arms all night.