Benjy’s process of perceiving and understanding existence is highly overlooked and labeled as insignificant idiocy when his perception of time and relationships through sensory imagery is extremely profound. While it doesn’t allow for readers to follow a typical linear time structure, it gives the audience “…a poetic and more sympathetic understanding of existence…” also mentioning specific examples of sensory perception from The Sound and the Fury: “I could smell the clothes flapping, and the smoke blowing across the branch” (Faulkner 14).

Faulkner, through his characters and personally, expresses his disbelief in the value of Benjy’s sentience, limiting his existence to his connoted confusing, chaotic, continuously burdensome behavior. As mentioned in Adler’s essay, to Faulkner, “Benjy is ‘someone capable only of knowing what happened but not why’” (Faulkner, “Paris Review” 1) (Adler). However, when Faulkner discusses and analyzes the most effective and influential means of artistic expression, he states that music better expresses what he attempts to explain “clumsily in words” (Adler). This excerpt reminded me of an interview I watched with New Zealand pop star Lorde, who described her experiences having synethesia and the ability to see images through music. In a sense, this is similar to what Faulkner is expressing, his own belief that music better expresses images he tries to express through words, and his own use of the word “clumsily” easily draws me back to descriptions of Benjy’s behavior. Thus, I think while Faulkner may not recognize the beauty in Benjy’s abnormal mode of perception and observation, the ability to take in moments in time so intensely and utilizing all of your senses, and to remember that and process future decisions based on those moments and experiences is remarkable. I liked Carolyn Porter’s mention of Benjy’s existence being “more poetic than narrative, and perhaps more pictorial than either, especially if we include cubist painting as a reference point” (Keith/Porter 40). While Lorde may utilize her synesthesia to create highly praised Grammy winning albums, Benjy’s unique mode of processing is consistently undermined and the meaning or significance of his existence as a sentient being ignored.

Works Cited:

Keith, LeeAnna, and Carolyn Porter. William Faulkner : Lives and Legacies, Oxford University Press USA – OSO, 2007. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/huntercollege-ebooks/detail.action?docID=416050.
Created from huntercollege-ebooks on 2020-09-03 10:39:12.

Burton, Stacy. “Benjy, Narrativity, and the Coherence of Compson History.” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature, 7.2 (1995) 207-228. JSTOR. 31 October

Faulkner, William. “Interview by Jean Stein.” The Paris Review. New York: 1956. Online.
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