Although preoccupied with such earthbound subjects as commerce, family, and sexual politics, Jason’s chapter is also concerned with matters of the spirit. Not that the two are mutually exclusive…

Indeed, one of the central themes of this chapter is the intimacy between one’s spiritual and secular lives: how characters’ spiritual beliefs play out in their daily lives and shape their relationships. There are many examples of this throughout the chapter, especially related to Jason, whose misanthropy is, I believe, rooted in a deeper spiritual pessimism and confusion regarding justice, forgiveness, mercy, the afterlife, salvation, and original sin.

Here, I’d like to focus on how the spiritual-secular interplay is dramatized by Caroline Compson, Jason’s mother, and Earl, Jason’s boss. Each character personifies a divergent set of beliefs about God. In her role as a mother and relationship with her children, Caroline embodies both the remote and unmerciful God she worships and the follower she sees in herself, born into original sin and forever in God’s debt. Earl, on the other hand, represents to Jason a God that is present, forgiving, patient, and virtuous, a version of God he does not recognize and therefore rejects.

Note: I realize this entry is long, so feel free to read about just one character if you choose.

Caroline

Caroline’s Christian image of, and relationship to, God can be gleaned in the brief conversations she has with Jason throughout the chapter (216). In each conversation, she makes at least remark that illustrates her beliefs. One such belief is that God is a source of punishment and judgement to sinners. “’I know that people cannot flout God’s laws with impunity,’” she proclaims to Jason (199). “’Let me never see the day when my children will have to accept that, the wages of sin. I’d rather see even you dead in your coffin first,’” she later tells him, referencing Romans 6:23 (The irony of Jason hearing this is amusing). Modeling herself on the image of God she describes, Caroline enacts her own form of punishment on Caddy, banishing her from the family for becoming a “fallen woman” (220). Beyond this punitive gesture, she remains an ineffectual parent, physically present but contributing little, as distant as the God she always thanks.

Her view of original sin is intimated (a little glibly, I think) when she discloses to Jason that while her husband believed that Caddy and brother Quentin “didn’t need controlling, that they already knew what cleanliness and honesty were,” she felt that “they were allowed too much freedom” (261). Her belief in inherent evil is further emphasized in her welcoming to Quentin as a baby: “’You will never know the suffering you’ve caused’” (199). Her notion that man is indebted to God due to original sin finds a secular analogue in her view of “flesh and blood,” which she brings up several times to remind Jason and herself of their God-given obligation to their kin (181 and elsewhere). Both characters see blood, kinship, and inheritance as burdens rather than blessings, bonds to be endured rather than relished, . In one instance, Caroline speaks of it as the source of a “curse,” which is not unlike Jason’s own characterizations of it, repeated over and over again in narration and prefaced each time with “Like I say…” as if it were a mantra (181, 232, 238, and elsewhere).

Earl

An alternative to Caroline’s conception of God is presented in Earl. While Earl doesn’t reveal his spiritual beliefs verbally like Caroline, his way of treating Jason in his role as Jason’s boss demonstrates a type of leadership, professional or spiritual (here there’s little difference), built on benevolence, trust, and forgiveness, despite his occasional capitulation to passive-aggressiveness (nobody’s perfect) (227-28). Observe, for example, the long list of “sins” Jason commits against Earl throughout the day. He arrives late and soon after dips out to speak to a cotton salesman and visit the telegraph office (189, 191-92). He reads and burns mail while Earl busily waits on customers (193). He ignores Earl’s instructions to grab a fast dinner (lunch) at a nearby luncheonette so that he can get back in time to meet the pre-concert rush – and instead takes an extended break to run personal errands (210-11, 215-27). The list goes on and on.

Despite Earl’s awareness of such offenses, he refuses to punish Jason. Instead, he forgives him and continues to endow him with trust, letting him leave the store when he wishes. This isn’t mere naivety, but an effort of wisdom. Earl believes that only by granting Jason free will will his employee develop, through trial and error, a sound moral responsibility. His decision is predicated on the faith that Jason, despite his disobedience and repugnant ill-will toward Earl and the store, is nevertheless inherently good. Rather than tell Caroline that Jason shadily used his power of attorney over her bank account to withdraw her investment in the store and spend it on a car without her knowledge, Earl instead kindly advises Jason to “be more careful” going forward (228). He allows Jason the freedom to recognize the errors of his ways. This position stands in marked contrast to Caroline’s belief that children need to be explicitly taught what is right and, even after they reach adulthood a la Caddy, should be gravely punished for their sins. It’s the difference between a God that allows His followers to discover what’s right and a God that commands it from on high.

Earl displays kindness and respect to his neighbors, regardless of their past sins or status (except for when he yells at Job?). He expresses sympathy for Caroline due to her “’misfortunate life,’” which we assume is related to the deaths of Quinten the older and Mr. Compson, Benjy’s disability, and the family’s long fall from nobility (227, 229). Showing no class bias, he speaks about the farmers attending the show with compassion: “‘Let them spend a little money on a show now and then. A hill farmer works pretty hard and gets mighty little for it” (249). When Jason derides them, Earl rhetorically asks him “‘Where would you and me be, if it wasn’t for the farmers?’” reminding Jason that the lowly objects of his ire are the very people who enable him to earn a living (249).

Despite receiving so much good will from Earl, Jason nevertheless views him as an adversary. He expects Earl to reprimand him for being late and repeatedly tries to goad him arguments (189, 245-46). A revealing moment arrives when Earl bluntly asks Jason if he would like to quit, and Jason in turn asks why he doesn’t just fire him. We don’t hear Earl’s answer, as Jason drowns him out with his inner-monologue and leaves the room. However, it’s implied that Earl refuses to fire Jason because firing him would only re-enforce Jason’s solipsism, his belief that the entire is pitted against him, and that whatever hardships he experiences are their fault and not his own. Without taking responsibility for his attitude and actions, he’ll continue to lead the same tortured life he spends all day griping about, just like his mother. Earl wishes to show Jason that he has more control over his circumstances from within than any distant, omnipotent God his mother teaches him to fear.

The Compson family is no more! The empire has fallen! Or at least, the family had nearly fallen due to the chaos caused by the incompetency of its characters to revive the family name. Chapter 4 of The Sound and the Fury solidifies how the family’s legacy almost fell into obscurity, with a narration by a 3^rd person through the perspective of Dilsey.

            Of the events of this concluding final chapter, perhaps one of the central and most challenged ideas of the novel is that of the motif of “family.” Specifically gender roles and the particular family dynamics of each and every member. Beginning with Mrs. Compson and her relationship with her children, Mrs. Compson attempts to exile members of her own family who have gravely sinned or wronged the family name—a great purge of the Compson empire, if it will. This becomes especially true with her own daughter. As learned throughout the novel, Caddy breaks away from the traditional, often religiously guided, gender role of a being a “southern lady” of a well-respected southern family to instead evolve into a free spirited, sexually open, individual woman. As illustrated in Chapter 4, Mrs. Compson burns the checks belonging to Caddy, metaphorically burning her and all her sins away from the family. Caddy has always been the black sheep of the family, and with Mrs. Compson being the controlling shepherd that she reveals she is, has little patience for those who do not follow along with the rest of herd. It is interesting how even though Caddy is so critically central to the events that unfold in this story, she herself is pushed out from having her own narration or chapter in the novel, thus solidifying her banishment from her family and having anything to say to defend her side of the story.

            While Caddy is subsequently pushed out of the family, the male figures in the Compson story represents a fall of their masculinity. Returning to the theme of family and gender roles, it is traditional that men of the south and any culturally conservative household in general become “strong” “embodied leaders,” especially to become inheritors to their family’s legacy. And although more than three quarters of the novel illustrates the perspectives of three central male characters, all of them end up incompetent to inherit the family legacy at all, let alone restore the family name. With their individual traumas, defects, and incredibly outlandish obsession with their sister Caddy, the main three men seem to have each failed (either voluntarily or involuntarily) to revive the family name for the next generation of Compsons. Hence, cutting the amount of “time” that the Compson family has left to survive its own internal struggles. Some of this blame can also be put on Mrs. Compson herself and her failure to successfully lead the family the way she would have wanted, and to instead have all three of her sons become utterly intrenched in the whereabouts and behavior of their own sister instead of learning to take charge of the family when she is inevitably gone. In short, pun intended, while the Chapter does end on a high note with Dilsey taking charge, the concluding message of the novel leans to that of chaos of a once high and mighty family, desperately trying to reorganize and reidentify itself for its survival for the future.    

The Sound and the Fury composes a simultaneously stereotypical and still deeply complex image of Reconstruction south, where norms and stereotypes are displayed but intricately expanded beyond ignorant perceptions through Faulkner’s humanization of these characters. However, at the same time, I want to immediately dispel any heroism or white-savior-worship to ensue by saying black people are infinitely complex and multifaceted and Faulkner’s creation of multifaceted characters does not warrant applause or admiration. However, this complexity illustrated most significantly through Dilsey does warrant conversation and curious exploration as the character’s distinct individualism eliminates many typical mammy connotations.

Throughout the novel, it is important to state that in this web of corrupted chaos, Dilsey is perhaps the only real voice of value and integrity, much of which she owes to her spiritual practice and faith. And while she has these values, she isn’t a “be kind and loyal” black caretaker in that she operates on her own system as she chooses, the first example of which being her allowance and encouragement of the children to go play in the rain when Miss Compson wouldn’t allow such behavior. Historically, mammy characters are kind, loyal and void of any of their own thought processes or reasonings, merely a selfless, dehumanized and entirely desexualized caricature of dark skinned, larger and middle aged Black women. However, through these behaviors and decisions we realize that Dilsey goes against the mother’s wishes because she knows best — not that she thinks that, per say, but that from our reader’s perspective, we understand and trust her to know better than any other character in the novel. She has the most sense. And she is the most human. She epitomizes goodness while other characters dip their toes in destructive patterns and behaviors. 

For example, we see a stark difference in humanity between Jason, a bitter and scornful misogynist, and Dilsey, a woman who aside from maintaining the order and balance between the two families earns deep societal respect, particularly in her church community, for adhering to a code of ethics. However, she isn’t a silent but good character whose victimhood overshadows their identity, for she also is not afraid to say what must be said regardless of whom she is speaking to. While she knows Jason intimately, a typical Southern mammy, historically speaking, would seldom interject her own opinion or influence into conversation, but in The Sound and the Fury, she condemns Jason’s dishonest and unethical attempts to prevent Caddy from seeing her daughter, saying “I like to know whut’s de hurt in letting dat po chile see her baby”. She creates pause and reflection and stops the movement of the scene, demonstrating her deep influence and impact on the family and in the novel. But perhaps even more striking, even more separated from common mammy tropes is her direct confrontation and challenging of Jason’s character and masculinity. She states “yous a cold man, Jason. If a man you is,” a moment that clearly signifies that much of this story, though never told from her perspective and limited in outright and blatantly stating her impact, is hers. It’s interesting to explore the typical manifestations of a mammy character and how, in many ways, Faulkner challenged these stereotypes and denied that role for Dilsey, instead and emphasizing her humanity and connection, but in many ways still subjecting her to the same situations and responsibilities a Reconstruction South black caretaker would have.

The themes of order and chaos permeates throughout most of The Sound and The Fury. We first get a glimpse of it during Benjy’s tumultuous section, then this sense of disorientation amplifies during the Quentin section. Jason’s section is arguably a bit more tamed than its predecessors. However, the themes of chaos and disorder still ring true in this, for the most part, straightforward section. The disorder comes to a staggering and violent climax during the Dilsey section as narratives tend to do in their final chapters, even though TSAF is not a conventional at all. The interesting part of this constant ouroboros of chaos and disorder is that, save for Mrs. Compson, the characters who are constantly in a state of disorder are the male characters while the women serve as true north, or the rational voice that keeps the boiling frustrations from spilling over the small pots in which it cooks. (One can argue that Faulkner was a closeted feminist)

            Let’s start with the obvious: Caddy. She serves as the prime obsession of all three brothers. Starting in the Benjy section, Caddy is the only person who can tame Benjy’s tumultuous bellowing and fits, and she serves as his only defender and accepter regardless of his disabilities. She helps to contain the chaos going inside Benjy’s mind in a way that none of the other characters can, aside from Dilsey, whom we’ll get to later.  “Caddy smells like trees” (TSAF Multiple) Benjy says throughout the novel. This one sentence can be read as Caddy bringing Benjy back under control. Moving on to Quentin, whom Caddy also served as a surrogate mother figure to, he hailed Caddy so high in importance that she was ultimately the catalyst for his self-inflicted demise. It can be argued that Caddy is the reason why Quentin is in his state of rupture, but it can also be argued that Caddy is also the only one who can bring back some form of order in Quentin’s life. “If I’d just had a mother so I could say Mother Mother,” (TSAF 172) Quentin says multiple times. 

            Caddy also lingers over the Jason section. She is the reason for Jason’s aggression but could have also been the reason that Jason might have found some peace in his life. Jason’s current life during his narrative is so fixed on Caddy. His life still revolves around her, and in a way, this hatred towards Caddy has brought Jason a new sense of order in his life, even though it’s an awful way to live; he’s the new head of the Compson household, he demands his meals at fixed times, he requires everyone to sit at the table with him, and he also keeps watch over miss Quentin. This is Jason’s new life and it’s all because of Caddy. She has created this new sense of order for him. “I wouldn’t lay my hand on her. The bitch that cost me a job, the one chance I ever had to get ahead, that killed my father and is shortening my mother’s life everyday…” (TSAF 304) Jason says ironically. He definitely feels like hitting her for being the reason for everything that has happened to him. Regardless if its chaos or order, Caddy has the helm in controlling it. It’s interesting to point out that even though Caddy sees through Jason’s malice, she still maintains her cool for the sake of her daughter. She succumbs to his demands and keeps a leveled head just to get the chance the see Quentin further promoting the notion that the women in the novel have clearer heads than most of the men. Caddy’s life is not all fun and games, and arguably worse than her brothers, yet she doesn’t let her emotions get the better of her.

            Then comes Dilsey, who is arguably the most rational and the total embodiment of true north for the entire Compson family. Caretaker of the children and the entire household, Dilsey is the embodiment of strength and reason. Even when Faulkner eloquently describes her old and gaunt appearance, Dilsey manages to maintain order around the house, getting breakfast done on time, running errands for Mrs. Compson, making sure Benjy is taken care of, and most important, keeping the violence between Jason and Miss Quentin to a minimum.  Aside from Caddy being the focal point of chaos and/or disorder within the lives of the Compson sons, Dilsey is the focal point of order within the entire family. She takes Benjy to church on Easter regardless of what the townspeople gossip about, she gets in the way of Jason’s violence, she reassures Mrs. Compson that everything will be okay, while also taking care of her own family. At the very end of the novel, Dilsey tells Luster to drive Benjy around, but careful to not stray off the path, which Luster unfortunately does. This causes Benjy to go into an uproar, but calms back down when he begins to see the familiar route. If only Luster listened to Dilsey’s authorative voice, Benjy would have been hushed in his bubble of constant order.

Note: I mean neither to be flip about nor to fetishize suicide, real or fictional. We cannot truly know the depths of another’s pain; and life, no matter how charmed, can be excruciating above all else—one need only look to this year for proof. However, it’s hard to overlook the preponderance of suicide as a device in literature, and, distressingly, the notable incidences among authors. 

What is it about the literary suicide and water? Throughout history, and specifically in American Letters, for characters and creators alike, when the ‘‘ridicuto absurdum’’ (as Jason Compson would no doubt say) of existence is too much to bear, the strongest draw seems to be — via bridge, boat or shore — to submit themselves back to the sea. Virginia Woolf, stones in her pockets; John Berryman and Hart Crane, scions of Modern American Poetry, the former from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minnesota, the latter from a steam ship in the Gulf of Mexico; Ophelia (we’ll claim her as a part of the American Mythos since the Band did) vaunted to symbolism by her drowning; Spaulding Gray and the Staten Island Ferry; and, finally, Quentin Compton, plunging from that bridge in Cambridge.

I should pause here to note that these water-based deaths are but a cross-section and elide many, many other examples by means as varied as arsenic, bullet and train. All tragic and, I’m sure, containing respective nuances in their coincidences. But there is something undeniable about water, about the sea, something I imagine Faulkner was hip to, and which binds Quentin to these other examples by virtue of his chosen exit from existence. Each of these authors and characters possessed an innate vulnerability as apparent as anything else in their character, and one can read in their choice of end a type of nurturing, at odds with the harsh violence of the world around them. As rough as the waves may be, as unforgiving as the ocean can be, as treacherous the fall from any bridge, a return to the sea is also a return to birth, to the waters of the womb; an envelopment; hug as ending. Above all else, Quentin Compson is unable to reconcile his deep, feeling, yearning insides with cool cynicism the world outside him.

Janet St. Clair, in her wonderful essay on Quentin for the Johns Hopkins University Press, The Necessity of Signifying Something: Quentin Compson and the Rejection of Despair, argues that despite being “born into a family where self-pity and cynicism have suffocated love and moral standards,” Quentin “invests his life in a fanatical but heroic campaign to rebuild a stable center of meaning from the delayed fragments.” She goes on to rebut those who have labeled him a “romantic failure, broken and destroyed,” and to insist instead that he more complicated than that, “endowed by Faulkner at once with the most pathetic and the most ennobling attributes of the human heart,” and not merely tortured by Caddy’s perceived loss of innocence or his own lack of experience, but nobly attempting to reckon with “the so-called classic regard for social order and communal rules of conduct.” He is a sensitive soul struggling to make sense. He is a boy apart struggling to square what his version of a ‘man’ might be with the upright image thrust upon him by his family, by the American South, and the Boy’s Club of Cambridge alike. Quentin struggles to understand and put into lived practice the ‘wisdom’ dispensed to him by his father, a man who gave him a watch but no compass.

As Quentin’s chapter opens, we’re met almost immediately with Quentin’s recollection of his father’s voice in regards to this watch:

“I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excrutiating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.” (TSAF, 76)

When we come to understand that this is Quentin’s final day on earth – and especially once we witness him smash the watch in question – it crystalized that his father’s words weigh heavy, and that he is being driven somewhere by them. But I am not sure that Quentin ever comes to a place of understanding his father’s words or intent. This I would argue is not a failure of Quentin but of his father. Jason Compson – referred to elsewhere in the novel as having “passions” and shown to us to be at the minimum an alcoholic – clearly sees in Quentin a sensitive bent, and potentially as an intellectual equal, but the novel gives us little proof that he ever truly saw Quentin or took the time to put his advice in the proper context of lived experience.

We know that Jason has lived long enough to see the Southern Way of Life irrevocably changed; to have the mother of his children succumb to bitterness and hypochondria, to watch one of his children enfeebled. What we do not know is how old Quentin was, or what of life he had seen, when Jason began to lay this heady psychological rap on his firstborn, treating him more like a bar-stool buddy than a child in need of guidance and nurturing. I do not feel sorry for the Compson patriarch, but I can understand where his philosophies take root—hell, I may even agree with some of them. It is appalling, however, when you take in all of his advice in aggregate – if we are to take the narrative at face value, and assume no intentional omissions on Quentin nor Faulkner’s parts—and realize that Quentin, a sensitive soul with a self-professed “blundering sense of noblesse oblige,” (TSAF, 91) about whom even the loathsome Spoade admits “children and dogs are always taking up with him like that,” (TSAF, 136) as a testament to his good nature, has spent his life guided by the following:

• “…that’s what is so sad about anything: not only virginity…nothing is even worth the changing of it.” (TSAF, 78)
• “…you’d think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune.” (TSAF, 104)
• “…no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.” (TSAF, 76)

And so on. A healthy dose of cynicism is one thing, but it is little wonder, with a mother bound up in her own neuroses and a father prone to ineffectual rhapsodizing, that Quentin honestly thinks the ultimate taboo of incest might set he and Caddy free. His short life is marked by his persistent inability to square the overflowing of emotion he feels, with what he’s been taught to think, and as a result he often overacts. Because of his father’s advice, Quentin seems to have spent his entire adolescence feeling stuck “in time” and battling fruitlessly to get out, until, exhausted and overcome, he takes what must appear to be the only rational action he can to try and end time all together, returning himself to what may well be the last ‘time’ he felt truly held – back, back into the womb, the tomb, the sea.

The irony is that, for a young adult better prepared, his father’s words– “only when the clock stops does time come to life,” (TSAF, 88) – might have been absorbed as a looser sort of mantra — meant, I might posit, to encourage his child’s freedom from strictures, from expectation from time  Quentin, unfortunately, is short the emotional tools to parse this and takes these words literally. When that literal act (smashing the watch) doesn’t end his suffering and free him of time, doesn’t bring him to life, he drifts pointedly to an end that is as woeful an instance of young adult hyperbole as one can imagine. The ultimate over-correction: can’t stop the clock to bring time to life so you might as well stop time to end you and life both.

This feels like the tragedy of Quentin Compson. Had this boy – and I think it is important we see him as a BOY, a child – been truly seen and held by anyone other than Caddy—his younger sister, and herself a child yearning for her own, inherently more limited freedom!!!—he might have been better calibrated to take his time, to recognize his own gifts for feeling (I think of his lovely metaphorical flourish in describing the bird “[whistling] again, invisible…inflexionless, ceasing as though cut off with the blow of a knife…” (TSAF, 136) and compassion (the misguided tenderness with which he treats both Caddy and the little girl). He might have been okay to just be a child, a boy, to find himself outside of his family, to feel his goddamned feelings and to know this undermined not one iota of his masculinity (a societal tragedy for another day). He might have been content instead to walk that Cambridge river as the flaneur, notice his shadow on the water, and be compelled neither to drown it nor join it, but to recognize it for what it is: a refraction and an extension of his self, his furthest reach, where he meets light, and not as he insists in vain an ‘other’. But Quentin is never fully seen nor held, not by any other and not by himself; and so he joins that tragic laundry list and returns to the sea.

While navigating the world as a woman I’ve found that certain men who have a particular dislike of woman have based their view of women on their relationship to their mother. Often times when I talk to someone who thinks women are manipulative, gold diggers, less intelligent and countless other stereotypes, they tend to hold these beliefs most true about their own mothers. Something interesting is happening in The Sound and the Fury although, where the mother was so neglectful, that each son had instead based their views of womanhood on Caddy. This explains why instead of a fixation on their relationship with their mother, which every therapist will vouch that a good amount of the population exhibits, each of the Compson boys have an obsession with Caddy in their own way. 

This is the clearest with Benji, who Caddy babied and took care of more than their mother did. Benji, who is depicted to think like a child, wishes to remain by his mother-figure’s side.

Jason the middle child, got the worst hand out of the Compson children. He was born when conditions were most likely worsening, i.e. mother getting older and more neglectful, father’s alcoholism worsening. This assumption being made solely due to the fact that if behaviors don’t stop they just get worse the longer they go on. The age during which Jason was young and needed attention, the family had to deal with Benji who clearly needed a lot more attention. So Jason not getting attention from his mother or Caddy, gained resentment for women in general, but definitely most focused on Caddy. Jason’s hatred is a direct result of not being shown love as a child. His bitterness is best summed up by the line “I was a kid then. I believed folks when they said they’d do things. I’ve learned better since then” (TSATF p206)

Quintin being the oldest, got the best hand. He is the only one that got to go to college, which shows even though the parents were still neglectful, they gave more to him than any of the other children. Being the oldest, there was no one to compete with for affection as a baby, and when Caddy was born they got along great. His mother constantly being frail and needing saving, made Quintin view women this way as seen in the story with the little girl and remarks he makes about women in passing. Caddy who was so unlike their clearly unpleasant mother, made Quintin idolize her. But he idolized her in the way Quintin was taught to show affection. Quintin’s mother engraved into him that the best thing he can do for a woman is save her and thats all he wanted to do for Caddy. This association is most literal in the flash backs of conversations Quintin has. He remembers Caddy saying she’s sick which is something the mother, being a hypochondriac, always said. “Sick how are you sick” (TSATF p111) Caddy then proceeds to ask Quintin to take care of Benji because thats always been her job. One of the last flash backs Quintin has of Caddy is of her as a caretaker.