In William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the characters’ relationship with time plays a key role in their personal development. Each of the characters to whom Faulkner dedicates a chapter have an alternate view on the passage of time, offering different insights into the way humans interact with it. For Benjy, time is meaningless. Every moment to him feels as though it had just occurred and he cannot differentiate between the past and the present. Simply hearing the name of his sister brings him back in time and he literally relives the moment, unaware that this is only a memory. Time is in constant flux, and attempting to understand his experiences can be disorienting as his brain functions in such a different way from my own. In
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His relationship with time is almost as complicated as Benjy’s. The beginning of his section mentions him returning to time as he hears the watch his father gave him, the watch his father entitled “the mausoleum of all hope and desire” (76). Thus, we approach him with the awareness of his obsession with time and the pain that it brings. He later breaks his watch, journeys to a watch shop, and simply wants to know if one of the clocks is telling the right time but not what that time is. Perhaps, that relates to the way Quentin views the future, weakening if the moral codes he saw were right but ultimately deciding it was simply better not to know, in case it contradicted with his personal chosen …show more content…
The past matters in the sense that it has caused certain events in the present. The actions of Quentin and his father have left him in charge of a dying estate, making it impossible for Jason to ever attain the wealth and significance he craves. For those left under his care, he considers them as people who drain his wealth, especially Miss Quentin and the family’s black servants, constantly noting how he buys them food. Like Quentin, Jason often notes the current time, though these comments center around time-sensitive tasks he must complete and lack the anxiety that accompanies
His relationship with time is almost as complicated as Benjy’s. The beginning of his section mentions him returning to time as he hears the watch his father gave him, the watch his father entitled “the mausoleum of all hope and desire” (76). Thus, we approach him with the awareness of his obsession with time and the pain that it brings. He later breaks his watch, journeys to a watch shop, and simply wants to know if one of the clocks is telling the right time but not what that time is. Perhaps, that relates to the way Quentin views the future, weakening if the moral codes he saw were right but ultimately deciding it was simply better not to know, in case it contradicted with his personal chosen …show more content…
The past matters in the sense that it has caused certain events in the present. The actions of Quentin and his father have left him in charge of a dying estate, making it impossible for Jason to ever attain the wealth and significance he craves. For those left under his care, he considers them as people who drain his wealth, especially Miss Quentin and the family’s black servants, constantly noting how he buys them food. Like Quentin, Jason often notes the current time, though these comments center around time-sensitive tasks he must complete and lack the anxiety that accompanies