In his classic novel The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner artfully depicts the tragic downfall of the Compsons, a once elite, aristocratic, white Southern family. Seeking to unveil the tumultuous emotions and thoughts within his characters’ minds, Faulkner narrates his story from the perspective of the three Compson brothers (Benjy, Quentin, and Jason), along with a final section using a third-person point of view. With this structure, Faulkner explains the boys’ utter obsession with their sister, Caddy (formally Candace) Compson, especially concerning her increasing promiscuity. Faulkner intensifies this conflict by utilizing to great effect a stream of consciousness storytelling technique, transcending the normally resolute convention
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From the very beginning of his section, Quentin is trying to escape the influence of time, the resulting “reducto absurdum of all human experience” (Faulkner 76). As he learns from his father, time will dampen the great emotional distress of current events in the future, which disturbs Quentin tremendously. He cannot allow himself to forget the sin he has imparted upon himself of allowing Caddy to participate in her promiscuous behavior. The fact that “its [sic] not despair until time its [sic] not even time until it was” ruins Quentin’s perception of established concepts in his life – past is trivialized with time, a force itself trivialized by the human perspective (Faulkner 178). Unfortunately, unable to accept this viewpoint, Quentin remains trapped in complete obsession with time, from noting every ring of the factory bells to the ticking of his now useless watch. Not unlike the unnamed character’s uncontrollable preoccupation with the ticking he hears (which he attributes to a dead old man under his bed but is likely a product of his guilt) in Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, Quentin is neurotically possessed by his feelings of sin, betrayal, and disillusionment from his failure in keeping Caddy pure, a self-castigation he refuses to give up (Swatridge). Conditioned by his mother to uphold the now-antiquated Southern ideals, Quentin cannot accommodate new social standards and by the universal need for approval, the standards of which have changed drastically and left him in quite a dearth of approval, Quentin wallows in his guilt, a mixture culminating in his suicide (“Understanding the Psychology”). Faulkner clearly advocates against such a stagnate viewpoint, instead promoting a perspective on time similar to Siddhartha’s in Herman Hesse’s classic: time is a continuum, upon which humanity effects a rather miniscule influence on the stream of life (Hesse
From the very beginning of his section, Quentin is trying to escape the influence of time, the resulting “reducto absurdum of all human experience” (Faulkner 76). As he learns from his father, time will dampen the great emotional distress of current events in the future, which disturbs Quentin tremendously. He cannot allow himself to forget the sin he has imparted upon himself of allowing Caddy to participate in her promiscuous behavior. The fact that “its [sic] not despair until time its [sic] not even time until it was” ruins Quentin’s perception of established concepts in his life – past is trivialized with time, a force itself trivialized by the human perspective (Faulkner 178). Unfortunately, unable to accept this viewpoint, Quentin remains trapped in complete obsession with time, from noting every ring of the factory bells to the ticking of his now useless watch. Not unlike the unnamed character’s uncontrollable preoccupation with the ticking he hears (which he attributes to a dead old man under his bed but is likely a product of his guilt) in Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, Quentin is neurotically possessed by his feelings of sin, betrayal, and disillusionment from his failure in keeping Caddy pure, a self-castigation he refuses to give up (Swatridge). Conditioned by his mother to uphold the now-antiquated Southern ideals, Quentin cannot accommodate new social standards and by the universal need for approval, the standards of which have changed drastically and left him in quite a dearth of approval, Quentin wallows in his guilt, a mixture culminating in his suicide (“Understanding the Psychology”). Faulkner clearly advocates against such a stagnate viewpoint, instead promoting a perspective on time similar to Siddhartha’s in Herman Hesse’s classic: time is a continuum, upon which humanity effects a rather miniscule influence on the stream of life (Hesse