We become aware of ways in which the members of the Compson family begin to define themselves as kinds of characters who keep reappearing in later Faulkner novels; and as a group, it gradually becomes clear that they share a human condition which concerned Faulkner from the very beginning (in Soldiers’ Pay) but which does not receive a comprehensive and imaginatively complex rendering until this novel: that is, the condition of entrapment, of victimization. In the first place, all members of this family are entrapped in it. Some of them are also victimizers. In one way or another, with the exception of Dilsey, all try some means of escape. In general the family situations described in this novel are destructive; aside from Dilsey, the Caddy-Benjy relationship, and the brief period before Caddy’s “fall,” it is hard to find anything generative in this novel. Certainly, the Compsons as a whole cannot be understood as a generative family, a family from which either guidance in the present or any sort of future can come. In fact, they are, like other Faulkner families, a group with no future; they come from the past into the present and then simply run out. Their history is all in the past and consists of a rise and fall with no possibility of another rise. They are the end of a line. Dilsey will endure but the Compsons have run out, just as the Sutpens later do. It is the last stage of their decline that Faulkner gives us in this novel. He does not even tell us why they decline; there are no historical lessons in the novel. He simply depicts the last stages of the dissolution. If you look for causes you will not find them. It was not until later that Faulkner began to search for the causes—say in Light In August, Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses.
The social unit within which all of these characters exist and within which we always see them is the Compson family in decline; but these characters have ontologies of their own which we become aware of. The characters are all trapped in this declining family; they are also often trapped in their own ontologies, as so many other Faulkner characters are. Faulkner, as a novelist, was not just interested in writing about family, or history, but was, like all novelists, concerned with character, with being, with the self, and particularly with destructive and generative being. The extent to which characters have being apart from the family varies, and provides one with another way of seeing what was going on in this first great fiction. The extent to which characters have being apart from the family is directly related to their ability to escape the family and/or the pervasive condition of entrapment and victimization which characterizes the lot of everyone in this novel.
The most completely trapped character in this novel is Ben. He is trapped in his scrambled genes. These are his family inheritance. As the last Compson son he is the family’s purest victim. He reminds one of Jim Bond, that last Sutpen son. But he is a special kind of victim because his genes are his accidental fate. No one had any real control over making him this way. He’s not like Quentin, for instance, who has been profoundly and deliberately shaped by his father. Benjy has very little being and such being as he has derives entirely from the family. He has no way to develop any of his own; he has no choices, really; he’s locked into idiocy for life. He is neither generative nor destructive. All you can do is tend him and love him and try to keep him from unnecessary suffering and harm. Without words, without language, and unable to articulate himself, he can only whimper and moan, yell and bellow. His cries of pain and anguish keep sounding throughout the novel. They are the most pervasive motif in the novel. Hush, we hear, hush, all the way through. But no one can really quiet Benjy for too long. Benjy is what the family comes to, but he is not purely symbolic. His suffering is too painful and real; his condition too terrible for this. His anguished presence makes it impossible to abstract him in this way. Benjy can’t escape. He is completely dependent. If it were not for Dilsey and Caddy, he would have no one to love and comfort him, since his mother denies him and his father has nothing to do with him. Left unattended, he would die. His keepers are the black children—Versh, T. P. , Luster. We are forced to respond to and understand Benjy as both a character and a symbolic construct (just as we are Joe Christmas, for example).
Benjy is the pure victim, one of the most pervasive kinds of characters in Faulkner; and he can never be anything else. There is no way to redeem him from his condition, and Faulkner was never much interested in the other kind of redemption. Faulkner’s life-long interest in and use of Christian symbolism in his novels is always secular and frequently ironic. It was redemption in this world that Faulkner was interested in. He is not really a religious novelist at all. The novels with the most Christian symbolism—this one, Light in August, Requiem for A Nun and A Fable are concerned with redemption (or lack of it) in this world and not with salvation and transcendence into some other. This is nowhere more evident than in A Fable where every Christian detail is carefully naturalized and secularized. Why does he set The Sound and the Fury on Easter weekend, then? For irony, I would say. Dilsey is no redeemer, nor is Ben. The Compsons are beyond redemption. Only Dilsey, of all the characters in this novel, has any of the Christian virtues—love, charity, compassion, pity, and an almost complete lack of discrimination in her view of the Compsons and in the way she acts toward them all; these virtues do not necessarily redeem her in the Christian sense; that is never a point in this novel; they raise her up to a noble, human level above the other characters because the force of what she does is always felt here in this world and is never construed as acts to earn her salvation in the other world. Ben is not a redeemer or a martyr; he is a poor, pitiful genetic accident. If we stretch the Christian/Easter symbolism, we can say that he is the lowly victim only Christ would bother to save. That point seems incidental to the novel and a distraction from the central concerns of it.
Quentin is very different from Benjy. He is the first son, not the last; he is the hope of the family and trapped in family expectations, obligations, and pieties. In a sense, he got it all, including Benjy’s pasture, and wasted it all when he committed suicide. He is the most verbal and complex of the children. He has the greatest number of possibilities. Ben has the least amount of being and Quentin probably has the most. But in many ways he is as hopelessly entrapped by his family inheritance as Ben is, but his is double, multiple entrapment. He has almost no being apart from the family. He is the most family conscious: Father, Mother, Caddy, sister, Jason, Ben, brother run like mounting debts through his section. The recurrent motifs of Quentin’s sections (aside from the pervasive family one) are time, Caddy (sister), Father said, virginity (purity and the loss of same), and incest. The overwhelming characteristic of this section is its verbalness, especially its concern for abstractions and Quentin’s capacity for verbal elaboration—a kind of uncontrollable laying on of words. Benjy has no words. The main characteristic of Benjy’s sections is its basic, raw experiential content. Quentin sometimes seems to be nothing but words, to have interposed so many words between himself and objective reality that action becomes a central problem. Put the other way around, it seems that Quentin has abstracted experience into words and concepts (something Dilsey never does, nor Caddy; but something which Mr. Compson, Mrs. Compson, and Jason do all the time) and that the separation between words, concepts, (what is possible inside his head) and experience (actuality) becomes so great that it is finally intolerable. Put in other terms, the separation between what Caddy was (before her fall) and is, and what he wants her to be, is so great that it becomes intolerable. Unable to reverse time and undo it, unable to talk what Caddy does away (Caddy does it because she likes it because she can’t help herself), unable to go back to or retrieve that time of symbiosis, he kills himself. He moves from “I was” to “I am” to “I am not.” He exercises the one absolute control he has—which is over his own being in time.
The central fact about Benjy is his idiocy; the central fact about Quentin is his suicide, his self-destruction. He escapes his various entrapments by this means. Unable to stop time or to reverse it, he simply removes himself from it. The “peacefullest words” he knows, Quentin says, are “and then I’ll not be” (174). In a study of destructive and generative being in Faulkner, it is certainly worthwhile to try to find out why, in his first great fiction, Faulkner has the character with the greatest amount of being self-destruct, as if too many words and too much being are by their very nature self-destructive. Or was it too much family? Caddy does not