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Jason and Caddy As Middle Children

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In Jason’s section of The Sound and the Fury it is blatantly obviously how he feels about women, both the ones in his life and in general. The beginning of his chapter, which starts with “once a bitch always a bitch, what I say,” (180) gives us the immediate sense of what Jason’s chapter will be like. We also see throughout the chapter that he is very entitled, racist, and greedy. Right from the start, we get a sense of the man that Jason has turned out to be, which is the idea that interested me the most while reading this chapter. In particular, how exactly did Jason come to be the type of man he is? What led him to act and think the way he does?

After doing just a little bit of research, I found out that Jason is one of the middle children, along with his sister Caddy. When I saw this, everything sort of just clicked for me. Caddy and Jason are the ones that, throughout the story, we and the characters of the story view as the ones that sort of act out. This completely coincides with the fact that they are both the middle children of the family; the middle children, who are often seen as the “overlooked” ones tend to be the children that act out and are more rebellious.

For instance, with Caddy, she is the child that “acted out” the most by completely disregarding her perceived reputation, both from her family and from the rest of the town. She wanted to explore her sexuality, and therefore, was the “rebellious” one of the family. As a result of her getting pregnant out of wedlock, she is kicked out of the family and becomes the sort of black sheep of the family.

With Jason, we can kind of see his “middle child” attitude come out on page 181 where he tells his mother “I never had time to go to Harvard or drink myself into the ground. I had to work.” To me, this sounds very much like a sort of petulant child that is angry at anything and everything that his siblings did or were able to do. Jason’s entitlement and greediness are also very apparent by the way he steals the money from Caddy that should be going to Quentin. To me, it seems like he feels that since he is the one that works for the family, that that money is automatically his even though he did not do a single thing to actually earn that money. Jason’s seemingly endless anger at the world, his family, and just his life in general also point towards him “acting out” because of being one of the middle children of the family. The middle child/children are often overlooked in a family and respond to that with anger or aggressiveness. With Jason, he never overcame this and brought this into his adult life, as one can see by how he treats Quentin and Dilsey in his chapter, for example on page 185 when Dilsey grabs hold of him: “Then the belt came out and I jerked loose and flung her away. She stumbled into the table.”

Irony, Solipsism, and Jason Compson

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Firstly, before going into how Jason employs irony and to what end, I want to make clear what sense of the word irony I’ll be using, because the term does contain a multiplicity of meanings and so can be vague whenever used. The sense of irony I’ll be using is one articulated by the German poet, critic, and philosopher Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, and I’ll refer right now to Terry Pinkard’s concise rendering of it in his book Germany Philosophy 1760-1860: “Irony,” he writes, “expresses both our unavoidable commitment to certain projects and our own inevitable, reflective detachment from these things. Irony is thus the appropriate stance to feeling both inescapably committed and inescapably detached at the same time” (161). I’ll add as well that the name of the game for folks like Schlegel, a post-Kantian and a romantic, is Being, and so when he speaks of irony he is speaking of it as a mode of being, a kind of condition, and not simply a thing to employ on occasion.

Now, to begin understanding Jason’s use of irony first requires that we identify the impasse between inescapable commitment and detachment that it is contingent on. It’s perhaps redundant to state that most all of Jason’s commitments are not very genuine, and that time and again those ostensible commitments give way to his one monomaniac commitment—to himself. Indeed, there is a palpably nihilistic individualism about Jason that, I think, borders a kind of solipsism, which I’ll get to later; and the substance, so to speak, of this individualism—the medium with which it is preserved—is irony. On the one hand irony preserves Jason, preserves Jason qua Jason; on the other hand, though, its deployment is, as Schlegel thought, endemic of his detachment from himself. But what does it mean in concrete terms, that he’s “detached” from himself? Because I think it’s not so much a kind of alienation, which would imply a divorce between him and his environment and in turn him and himself; Jason does, after all, see himself everywhere he looks; he’s very confident in his own “realness,” as it were. But, confidence aside, there still remains the undeniable fact that Jason’s fortune hitherto has been purely incidental, contingent on the right folks of the Compson family being either dead or incapable; on his own he’s powerless, incapable of asserting himself in any meaningful way, and that’s why, I think, he places such existential significance to Quentin getting one under him by getting back her money and running away, it makes incontrovertible what he already knew but viciously denied, especially through irony. It’s the tension rendered here, then, that irony does not so much promise to resolve as it does to alleviate for a bit, to obscure. Let’s then look at Jason in town, the space I think is best demonstrated his one, frail means of asserting himself.

It’s interesting that of the figures whose subjectivity we’re allowed to inhabit for the duration of their section Jason is the only one who goes to town and exists in it. It’s more interesting that, despite this, one never gets the impression he actually participates in the society of the town. The town really only serves to punctuate his increasingly frantic back and forth between it and the Compson estate. He, like Benjy and Quentin, is still beholden to the private sphere of the family. But he also rejects the town in a way Benjy and Quentin never had an opportunity to. Because while he is there he menaces the town with disdainful judgement, not to mention that in interacting with the folks of the town his demeanor is none too different. He is in a state of constant repudiation, he can only say No. And it’s because, like with his own family, he sees the town as owing him something. This can be read implicitly in moments like when his boss asks him why he doesn’t just quit if he’s always apparently looking to get fired, and Jason rejoins with an allusion to an ambition of owning his own business (Faulkner 245). This desire for a business is an apt one. It would be for Jason an assertion of his own existence, much like the Compson estate is for his family. But it requires what might be called “creative force”—which I think Quentin possessed but was consumed by—and to a degree he simply doesn’t possess. And so that little creative force in him is used instead for preserving himself in a resin of irony, wholly incapable of doing anything else.

What amounts to Jason’s use of irony in The Sound and the Fury are these snide asides and digressions which serve as a brief withdrawal from the forefront scene before Jason. Not only a withdrawal from one scene, but the production of another altogether, one divorced from the former and charged with that pathos of distance Jason is always seeking. A good instance is an earlier scene with his boss. After Jason returns to his job from the Compson estate, and after some back and forth wherein his boss talks around Jason’s lying to his mother about investing money in this business of his, his boss says, “‘I don’t say anything,’ he says, ‘I just ask you to be a little more careful after this,” at which point follows what is essentially a riff by Jason:

I never said anything more. It doesn’t do any good. I’ve found that when a man gets into a rut the best thing you can do is let him stay there. And when a man gets it in his head that he’s got to tell something on you for your own good, goodnight. I’m glad I haven’t got the sort of conscience I’ve got to nurse like a sick puppy all the time. If I’d ever be as careful over anything as he is to keep his little shirt tail full of business from making him more than eight percent. I reckon he thinks they’d get him on the usury law if he netted more than eight percent. What the hell chance has a man got, tied down in a town like this and to a business like this. Why, I could take his business in one year and fix him so he’d never have to work again, only he’d give it all away to the church or something… (228)

This goes on and on and essentially consumes the scene with digression, and it even comes as a shock when we realize his boss is still there a page later, wholly unaware of this drama invented in Jason’s head. And this becomes almost a formula for Jason: dialogues and interactions invaded in much the same way as they were in Quentin’s section, only in Jason’s case what invades is stubborn judgement and irony.

As far as this thing of solipsism that I mentioned earlier, I feel this is only the logical conclusion of this form of irony that Jason entertains. These constant ironic interludes divorce the forefront scene from its context, making it only the material of an invented pastiche. Moreover, the individuals that people these scenes are denied individuality. In fact, I’d go so far to say that Jason does not even privilege others with any kind of interiority, or at least not the quality of interiority he would think himself to possess. He truly dehumanizes the people he encounters, evinced most explicitly with his family and most of all Quentin. But this is all necessary to preserve Jason, and the danger of quitting that distancing his irony affords him and entertaining any kind of intimacy with another person is the collapse of the image he has cultivated of himself as well as his reality.

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. Vintage Books, 1990.

Pinkard, Terry. German Philosophy, 1760-1860: the Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge University Press, 2004.

“Rigid Flowers” and Gaudiness: Jason and Dilsey’s Clashing Worldviews

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Although there are countless contrasts between the characters highlighted in the last two sections of The Sound and the Fury (Jason’s section, “April Sixth, 1928” and Dilsey’s section, “April Eighth, 1928”), one that is particularly compelling to me is the distinction made between the two segments’ central characters in terms of environmental indicators revealing the clash between the two characters’ worldviews.

Jason’s worldview is a very black and white one, as evidenced by his hateful dismissals of nearly everyone around him, including his own family members, based on reductive dichotomies (men = good, women = bad; white = good, black = bad, etc.) and his parallel inability to see anyone other than himself as a fully-fleshed person. Correspondingly, the environment in which Jason moves is a dark and drab one. The environmental cues hinting at Jason’s dark inner world exist in two somewhat paradoxical forms: decaying but ever-present nature and sterile urbanization. One instance of the coexistence of these elements occurs in the landscape surrounding Jason in the town of Mottson shortly after he becomes violent toward an elderly man while questioning him in an attempt to locate Quentin II. He describes an “empty platform where an express truck stood, where grass grew rigidly in a plot bordered with rigid flowers and a sign in electric lights,” which aligns with his overly rigid stance toward life (311). On the Compson property itself, the decaying weeds covering the property where sculpted gardens once reigned, in the glory days of the Compson family, signify the encroachment of nature onto the small amount of land that the family still owns, existing alongside the slow intrusion of urbanization, represented by the transformation of much of their land into a golf course, as discussed in class.

Dilsey’s view of the world is more colorful and expansive, resulting in the formation of warm and loving relationships with not only her family and select members of the Compson family but also the wider community of Jefferson, as evidenced by the affectionate greetings she receives from those she passes on her walk to church in the novel’s final section. The imagery interspersed throughout her quasi-narration of the last section is expressive of this. Dilsey is described as emerging from her cabin next to the Compson house on a Sunday morning clad in various articles such as a “maroon velvet cape” and “a dress of purple silk” as she moves among her various tasks. As she makes her way to the Compson house, “A pair of jaybirds came up from nowhere, whirled up on the blast like gaudy scraps of paper and lodged in the mulberries, where they swung in raucous tilt and recover” (266).

Also interesting is the manner in which these divergent worlds collide. Evidence of both worlds is observed by Jason and Dilsey alike and is intertwined throughout both of their narratives. Such a collision occurs in the opening lines of Dilsey’s section, upon her entrance into the Compsons’ world from her own home on their property:

The day dawned bleak and chill, a moving wall of gray light out of the northeast which, instead of dissolving into moisture, seemed to disintegrate into minute and venomous particles, like dust that, when Dilsey opened the door of the cabin and emerged, needled laterally into her flesh, precipitating not so much a moisture as a substance partaking of the quality of thin, not quite congealed oil. (265)

Since the world of Dilsey’s cabin is contained within the Compsons’ land, the color and life with which aspects of her life are infused appear to be merely specks of brightness within the larger, darker landscape of the Compson home. “Bleak and chill” days, “gray light,” and disintegrated “venomous particles” that violently pierce her skin assail her in the outside world.

Jason experiences similar collisions with what he views as “gaudy” intrusions into his rigid life. The colorful, dazzling fair that has come to Jefferson is a prime example. Jason spends a substantial portion of his section ranting about this fair, believing that it brings nothing of import to the town, although the people of Jefferson clearly derive satisfaction from it. Since Jason views everything in life as a transaction, he is of course unable to enjoy anything for the sake of enjoyment. This anger, which manifests throughout much of Jason’s section, perhaps reaches its zenith when Jason becomes frustrated with his search for Quentin II (“with her face painted up like a dam clown’s”) and the man with the bright red tie (232). When he sees the two in a passing car, recognizing both Quentin II’s face and the red tie, he “saw red,” stating “When I recognised that red tie, after all I had told her, I forgot about everything” (238). These incidents highlight an additional difference between Dilsey and Jason. When Jason is confronted with something that challenges his worldview, he often reacts with rage and violence, whereas Dilsey relies on her copious inner strength to traverse whatever comes her way.

tall tells: speech, power, and jason’s perspective

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From the outset, Jason’s character is specifically defined along a relationship to telling—as a child, it’s connected to his known position as a tattletale, and his early scenes in Benjy’s section of Jason only serve to confirm this. In these early glimpses, the act of “telling” bears a twofold function: it operates as a signifier of power as well as an act of self-determination. For example, in designating Dilsey to be in charge on the night of the funeral, their Father notes twice that the children must “mind Dilsey, now” (24). When Caddy then asks to be placed in charge, Jason disagrees:

“‘I wont.’ Jason said. ‘I’m going to mind Dilsey.’

‘You’ll have to, if Father says so.’ Caddy said. ‘Let them mind me, Father.’

‘I wont.’ Jason said. ‘I wont mind you.” (24, emphasis mine)

The act of verbalization implies a conveyance of power, at least in terms of the dynamic of the household. Through the act of verbalizing whom the children are to mind, the authority of their father becomes something able to be conferred, whether from himself to Dilsey, Dilsey to Caddy, etc. However, Jason also reveals the power of the act of verbalization to reveal. When Caddy mocks him for crying after eating, Jason threatens to tell on her only to have her answer, “You’ve already told. […] There’s not anything else you can tell, now” (26-27). Through “telling,” Jason has already played his card; once having revealed the secret, there is nothing further (at that point) for him to reveal. Simultaneously, the act of telling (about oneself) represents a means of self-determination. For example, “Jason said he wasn’t afraid of snakes and Caddy said he was but she wasn’t and Versh said they both were and Caddy said to be quiet, like Father said” (37). The act of verbalization performs multiple functions here. It draws Jason’s position as not afraid of snakes out of the abstract and unspoken into something more real, threatens consequence through an invocation of authority conveyed through speaking, and illustrates the volley between Caddy and Jason for a particular kind of social cachet (fearlessness among children).

In “telling” his side of things, Jason makes pronouncements in order to better defend his positions, often utilizing repetition as well as the structure of the rhetorical question to do so. This is first visible in an adolescent Jason’s exchange with Caddy: “You think you’re grown up, dont you. You think you’re better than anybody else, dont you…” (41). Caddy’s response is to demand his silence, which Jason refuses to heed, ending with a variation and repetition of his initial claim: “Just because you are fourteen, you think you’re grown up, dont you. […] You think you’re something. Dont you” (41). Further, his section of the novel opens with a character indictment that is anchored to a tag that attributes the comment to his act of speaking as he notes, “Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say,” which is repeated and used to bookend the end of his section as well, in a slightly variable form, “Like I say once a bitch always a bitch” (180, 263, emphasis mine). For the reader, his decision to verbalize is not only illustrated in his constant dialogue tags (“I says”), but also in the repeated uses of these phrasings, which continually foreground his position as the active speaker, a role that necessarily holds (or, at least, presents as) a position of narrative power. For example, in his run-in with Caddy later on, his rhetorical patterns emphasize the power he wields over her within the specific frame of the family—a power that is also defined by silence (a refusal to speak Caddy’s name):

“’We dont even know your name at that house,’ I says. ‘Do you know that? We dont even know your name. You’d be better off if you were down there with him and Quentin,’ I says. ‘Do you know that?’

‘I know it,’ she says” (203).

Jason dominates that particular exchange, and his position of power in the family is reasserted in his repetition and his ending question, which Caddy is then prompted to answer. In his dealings with Quentin (II), it is also his rigid control over Caddy’s “speech” (particularly through access to her letters) that gives him power over her, at least temporarily. In a novel where dialogue and speech constantly interject into the flow of narrative to redirect from linearity, Jason channels his furious presence into attempting to wrangle language into compliance through bluster and force as an attempt at salvaging not only the family reputation, but also his own.