All the brothers are fixated on some moment in the past when a loss occurred, and in all three cases it has to do with Caddy. Benjy, whose suffering and experience of loss is the most direct, the least mediated either by language or abstractions or social forms, simply suffers from the loss first of Caddy’s purity (her pure tree smell) and then of Caddy herself. His inarticulate moanings and bellowings sound his anguish over these losses throughout the novel. They make up one of the central concerns of the novel to emerge out of the concern with the Compson family. Beneath all of his words and abstractions about time and purity, Quentin suffers the same kind of anguish first over Caddy’s being penetrated by a stranger (any male outside the Compson family) and then by her departure when she gets married. His expression of this loss and of his suffering is very articulate; in a sense you could say that Quentin gives words to the kind of anguish and suffering he and Benjy share. Clearly what they share is the sense of a symbiosis having been broken in some irrevocable way so that what ever they knew back then, before Caddy’s fall, before her contamination, before her penetration by other males, before she came into her sexuality, grew up, and went out into the outside (i.e. non-Compson) world, can never be recovered. It is a final, an irrevocable loss for them. They suffer from a sense of excruciating withdrawal and loss of both love and the love-person or object. Quentin and Benjy—the eldest, wordiest and brainiest; and the youngest, most completely inarticulate and wordless, the first and last, the top and bottom—share, and share in a passionate reciprocating love-relationship with their sister.
Caddy, the mystery at the center of this novel, is clearly a very passionate and loving person, strongly and naturally motivated toward actions away from her brothers and outside the family. It is not really so much a matter of her wanting to “pollute” herself, as it is a hunger for experience, an inability and unwillingness to control the passionate sexual motivation, a powerful sense that she must escape from this in-turning, incestuous family if she is to save herself; a knowledge that, in fact, she must break the symbioses which dominated their childhood if she is not going to freeze into one of the most characteristic states of being in Faulkner: a state of being that derives from and sets in adolescence and never changes all the rest of a person’s life. Quentin is a good example. Hightower is another. Sutpen is another. Rosa Coldfield is still another. These are the “virgin” selves one finds everywhere in Faulkner’s novels. Quentin is one of the first great virgin selves in Faulkner, and he is virgin right to the end, even when Faulkner brings him back from the dead to use him again in Absalom, Absalom! Not Caddy. And not her daughter, both of whom are motivated by a powerful impulse to escape from the Compson household and family, which is joined to an equally powerful sexual motive.
Jason is also fixated on a moment in the past that is related to Caddy and her sexuality; his fixation has nothing to do with love and nothing to do with the loss of Caddy: it is concerned entirely with the loss of a possible economic opportunity, a career in banking, a way to make his way in the world which he almost got but lost before he had it—because of Caddy. Like the other brothers, Caddy gives his life its centrality, but in Jason’s case it is a negative center and involves him in a kind of labyrinth of victimization, self-victimization (he lacks irony and a sense of himself), and victimizing (of both Caddy and Quentin II). All three of the brothers are victimized by Caddy, but not really intentionally. You might say that for each of them, in different ways, Caddy is their fateful person because of the power that is within her. Faulkner is less interested in examining the causes of this than he is in simply presenting the facts of it. Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August are novels which examine the causes of things. The Sound and the Fury is much more purely presentational. It is the fact, rather than the cause of Benjy’s condition and suffering, that is so overwhelming in this novel. The same is true of Quentin. The causes are all here, but they are latent, recessed, just as Caddy is. The novel is more about loss, decline, anguish, and suffering, as conditions in the Compson Family, than it is about the causes of them. If it were about causes, Caddy would not be the mystery at the center of the novel, nor would so much of the novel be concerned with the refraction of her through the consciousness of others. She is not the cause of the family’s decline and dispersal; she is part of the condition itself. And certainly the novel would not begin and end with Benjy—who is almost pure effect—if the primary concern was with causes. The four attempts which Faulkner makes to “explain” the image of Caddy looking in the window are precisely that: attempts to explain a composite image in novelistic terms. This novel searches an image, a set of conditions (the final dissolution of the Compsons): not even the Appendix searches causes—it presents a chronicle. And the most objective part of the novel—section four—is not at all interested in causes: it chronicles Quentin II’s revenge on Jason and his futile ironic, semi-comic pursuit of her; Dilsey’s ministering to Mrs. Compson and Benjy; and Luster’s inadvertent, childish, vain tormenting of Benjy. It does this in four brilliantly executed scenes in which the Compsons (what is left of them in Jefferson) are simply presented to us in typical moments characterizing their end, their dissolution, the condition they have come to. Always superb at endings, Faulkner here gives us last scenes for Mrs. Compson, for Dilsey, for Jason, for Quentin II (departure, flight), and for Benjy—all of which occur, somewhat ironically, on Easter Sunday. Like the preacher says, we see the beginning and end here, in a kind of epiphanal epitome.
What we see here are the remnants of the Compson family. The father has finally drunk himself to death, the elder son has committed suicide, the only daughter has been thrown out by her husband because she was carrying someone else’s child, and is now living by unknown means in unknown places; the only grandchild has finally stolen back the money her uncle stole from her and fled with a small-time carnival man to places unknown, never to be heard from again; the mother ineffectual, rhetorical, and self-pitying as ever, does what she always does in a crisis—takes to her bed and camphor and lets Dilsey mange things; the second son, a hardware store clerk and small-time cotton speculator, ranting ineffectually and somewhat comically about being robbed to the Law (which ignores him), undertakes a futile pursuit of his niece, is nearly killed by mistake, is gradually rendered helpless by gas fumes, and must finally hire a black driver to get him home. Perfect; a synecdoche for Jason’s life. The third son, the last child, the helpless genetic victim, the quintessential symbol for the doomed (not cursed, really, just doomed) family moans, whimpers, slobbers, and bellows his way through this day, as he does every other day, being hushed and tended by Luster and Dilsey, the physical embodiment of, the inarticulate voice of loss, suffering, pain, disjunction, helplessness. Then there is Dilsey, who finally emerges here from the self-absorbed miasmic subjectivity of the first three sections to take her place as one of Faulkner’s great humane characters, completely grounded in objective realities, the embodiment of many potent Faulkner virtues. The dedication to Caroline Barr at the beginning of Go Down, Moses applies word for word for Dilsey. In this family of self-centered crazies, she is a kind of monumental figure of sanity and humanity. She is the first great example of Faulkner’s persistent tendency to locate his main positive values among the lower classes, especially among the women, black and white, and to locate them away from the head and in heart-centered characters. It is really Dilsey who keeps the remnants of this sorry family together. She is the opposite of the extreme head-centered characters like Mr. Compson and Quentin who deal in abstractions; and of the lower order head-centered characters like Jason who