Tag Archives: TSAF

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.”

Quentin’s sense of nativism

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Quentin’s treatment of his sister, Caddy, is symbolic of both white nativism and the notion of stereotypical Southern respectability. This is evident not only in his desire to either keep her pure or erase her and her perceived sins entirely, but also in Faulkner’s incest subplot between the two siblings. Quentin’s desire to marry her to “the same” speaks to his motive of keeping the blood pure, as it were, in more ways than one. He wants to keep Caddy pure both in the moralistic sense and in the sense that he does not want her marrying outside the family at all. He wants to control her to the point where she is legally under his thumb in perpetuity, and he wants to keep pure the blood of a family he still considers to be a proper, respectable example of Southern greatness. In “Whose America? Faulkner, Modernism, and National Identity”, John T. Matthews speaks to the type of white nativism that plagued the United States in the 1920s: “For nativists, American identity came to be understood as something one inherited by blood rather than acquired through citizenship” (Matthews 70). As in many European royal houses who sought to keep their lines pure through inbreeding, this solution could not sustain itself, nor could most changing societies sustain such symbols of social disparity. In fact, Quentin views his family in much the same way as these great European houses: as a great line which must be sustained at any cost. However, much like these royal houses (particularly at the beginning of the 20th-century and following World War I), the Compson family’s years as the pinnacle of Southern society are decidedly behind them.

Quentin sees Caddy (and women in general) as commodities to be protected either because they cannot or will not protect themselves. They have the potential to carry on the genetic “pure” line, and, if left to their own devices, can easily sully that line. Quentin, like his father, believes that women have an instinctive ability to be drawn astray, and they must be watched and controlled in order to protect the family honor and legacy, as well as to protect them from themselves. He feels Caddy’s sexual liaisons as a harsh betrayal and bemoans the behavior of “bitches”. This obsession with keeping the family line pure is reminiscent of American attitudes toward immigration at the time. As Matthews points out, “American nativism was hostile to internal minorities on the basis of their foreign or un-American connections” (Matthews 70). He draws a parallel between Caddy’s love life and what America should be—which, in his opinion, is more like the South (respectable, white, insulated). Caddy’s marriage and sexual liaisons are not respectable and bring “foreign” blood into the Compson family. Caddy’s betrayal is therefore compounded by her introduction of “un-American connections” into the family.

Quentin is obsessed with time and his family in its “prime”. His constant focus on watches and how everything but the sound of the ticking fades away speaks to his awareness of the rapid movement of time; and his stepping on his watch (whether on purpose or by accident—and, therefore, either knowingly of subconsciously) speaks to his desperate resolve to ignore the passing of time, or to freeze it. This is also evidenced by the fact that he does not care what the clocks in the window of the repair shop actually say, only whether or not they are “right”. He is more interested in the world subscribing to his idea of right than he is subscribing to reality.

Jason’s Section

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Jason comes off as a particularly coarse character in comparison to the other members of the Compson family, including the staff who may as well be considered family too. As many can and have pointed out Jason has a misogynist and racist frame of mind accompanied with a terribly selfish attitude. What struck me during his section is how concerned he seems to be about the very people he has a distaste for. Throughout Jason’s recount of things he notes time and time again the activities he feels women can’t do properly or should be doing instead. The first account of this is how he feels Quentin should be in the kitchen cooking instead of “gobbing paint on her face” (Faulkner 180). Later on, he states it’s “just like a woman” (Faulkner 190) when Caddy is late sending money as if he expects women to be incapable of handling business and money- and he treats them in such a fashion. He handles every Compson woman’s finances: the money Quentin receives from Caddy, the money Caddy attempts to give to see Quentin, and Mrs. Compson’s account and power of attorney. For a man that has so much disdain for women, he insists on being the center of their world. I’m aware of the time period The Sound and the Fury takes place in, this is a time (and a place) where men are expected to take charge of such things. Outside of the women’s financial business, Jason insists on inserting himself in the role of Quentin’s guide. I use that term very loosely as Jason only wants to beat Quentin into submission as opposed to letting Mrs. Compson and Dilsey handle her. He also takes it upon himself to be concerned about what his workers do or don’t do. When he points out that Quentin should be in the kitchen instead of them, he expresses the idea that they do nothing and are lazy. He repeats this sentiment when he goes hunting for Quentin and finds his tire has gone flat, “I just stood there for a while, thinking about that kitchen full of [n-word] and not one of them had time to lift a tire onto the rack and screw up a couple of bolts.” (Faulkner 242). Jason also pays his attention to the activities he believes the Jewish community is up to that in one way or another personally affects him (or so he believes). Jason’s section begins with the iconic line, “Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.” setting the tone for the rest of the chapter. What he doesn’t realize is that line is a reflection of himself. He is inadvertently calling himself out. I’m not in favor of using a derogatory term but as Jason insists on using it so, he is acting in much the same annoying way he expects women and non-white people to act. As he has always been that way, self-serving, and misogynist/racist, he will always be.

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.

Claudia Rankine, “The Sound and the Fury” poem

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It’s not about Faulkner, per se, but a student in another course sent me this poem from the contemporary African American poet Claudia Rankine. If Jason is a Trumpist before such a thing existed, I think we can see echoes of themes in Faulkner’s novel at work in Rankine’s moving meditation on the barriers to self-reflection that seem to be built into whiteness in the US:

“Sound & Fury”

Poetry: “This is what it means to wear a color and believe / the embrace of its touch.”

Mrs. Compson & Southern Sin

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It is undeniable that each family member of the Compson family holds their own twisted notion of gender, perceptions constituted by Southern power dynamics, ancient codes, and even psychosis. Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury presents the female body as a a construction of Southern identity, as a women’s sexuality is never freely hers but an embodiment of her family name, a vessel to be tamed. As I watched the havoc that was brought on by Caddy and Miss Quentin’s promiscuity, I couldn’t help but be reminded of a text from classical studies, “The Body Female and the Body Politic”, where the rape of ancient women brought on war in order to restore Roman identity. I found that the promiscuity of TSAF’s female characters had similar effects, as in using their bodies for pleasure we witness the rest of the Compsons, specifically Mrs. Compson, desperately scramble to uphold their good Southern name.

One can argue that the downfall of the Compson family can largely be alluded to Mrs. Compson’s contradictory relationship with the female body and sin. Mrs. Compson, who may at the outset appear as nothing but an archetypal Southern mother, ostracizes Caddy after she has a child out of wedlock. It isn’t necessarily Caddy, but her body, and how she used it to weaken their identity, that she shuns. Where war was brought on to correct unlawful sexual activity in the ancient world, Mrs. Compson attempts to correct Caddy’s sexual sins by erasing her from the family memory and burning her checks. As Mrs. Compson burns another one of Caddy’s checks, Jason points out that there are women worse than Caddy and that burning money is a shame, but she retorts, “Let me never see the day when my children will have to accept that, the wages of sin…I’d rather see you dead in your coffin first”. Mrs. Compson combats sin through destruction and the enabling of the same vicious cycle. Burning the checks and refusing to say Caddy’s name doesn’t restore their honor, however, but instead contributes to Jason’s burnt-out work ethic and Miss Quentin’s eventual running away from home. Mrs. Compson remains so intent on following these old codes that she doesn’t even seem to grasp the role she plays in kindling her family’s destruction.

Although Mrs. Compson constructs her identity around the idea of the controlled, modest female body, she still manages to contradict her perception of gender dynamics. In Reconsidering the Function of Mrs. Compson in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Ulrike Nüssler states, “Mrs. Compson’s brother wields power over her body, intellect, and speech, which should remain resting, passive, and banal…” (577). A letter from Uncle Maury discloses that “delicately nurtured” Southern women have no role to play in business, riffing on an ancient code to hide the fact that he’s taking money from her account. But still, this same passive women whose body supposedly belongs to men like Uncle Maury, insists on “keeping the keys”. Faulkner states, “From her pocket he tugged a huge bunch of rusted keys on an iron ring like a mediaeval jailer’s…” (325). The keys act as a symbol of the familial power that Mrs. Compson holds, despite her constant insistence that Jason is the head of the home. Despite presenting herself as passive and subordinate, Mrs. Compson’s shame for her daughter may be her only notion of gender that remains fixed throughout the novel. Mrs. Compson household power is not quite “delicate” or “nutured” but disastrous and contradictory, through the burning of checks, keeping of keys, and rebuffing of the past, she plays one of the largest roles in deteriorating the family unit.

One gets the feeling that the Compson household isn’t meant to be a striking example of the ideal Southern family, but instead a realistic, tragic picture of what can happen when generations fail to adequately transition between the old and new. The Compson family places an unfair amount of pressure onto Caddy and Miss Quentin, focusing on the sins of their female bodies as a way of dismissing and making sense of their faults. Mrs. Compson is so intent on judging Caddy’s past but fails to acknowledge how she failed as a mother. Quentin tricks himself into valuing the Southern honor system and seeking incest with Caddy as a way of making sense of his own confused perception of the world. Jason scrambles to tame Miss Quentin, but it’s all empty complaining with him, in truth he could care less about Southern honor codes. In truth, all of these characters have their own confused notions of gender, that only become more confused in Mrs.Compson;s attempt to restore an identity that never needed repairing.

A plight felt keenly

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Merriam-Webster defines the word “castrate” not just in the obvious sense of the removal of the testes or ovaries, but also as “to render impotent”, “to deprive of virility (emasculate)”, or “to deprive of vitality, strength, or effectiveness”.

The word “castration” has a double meaning in Benjy’s case: it is both a physical attribute and a description of his situation. The fractured nature of his mental state leaves him unable to effectively communicate with virtually anyone. The only person he is able to develop any sort of meaningful relationship with is his sister Caddy, and this is only because Caddy is singularly compassionate towards him and actively reaches out to, defends, and takes care of him—something which is looked on with increasing distaste as Benjy gets older. Benjy is very alone and is unable to do anything about it. His castration is not only symbolic of the fact that his branch of the family tree must now also be a lonely one, but also that he is set apart from others and is not an effective member of society. In a society that puts a great deal of weight on the idea of white masculinity and superiority, Benjy is left at a distinct disadvantage.

The concept of white masculinity in the Southern society of the time already frowns upon the idea of men being fragile in any way, physical or mental, and the fact that mental support and understanding is something that Benjy clearly, desperately needs does not endear him to those around him. He is expected to be strong and self-sufficient, and not rely on others to protect or take care of him. Their Mother views Caddy’s attempts to help Benjy as her spoiling him, and insists that Caddy must stop trying to carry him. Despite Caddy’s insistence that Benjy would be better if given some help, the family still sees Benjy’s predicament as a behavioral issue as opposed to a mental health one. He is deprived of all the attributes that are considered by the society in which he is living to be important for someone of his gender to possess—and he is punished harshly for it. The few stereotypically masculine traits he does have are subsequently taken from him, and he is left even more of a social pariah than he was before.

When Caddy leaves, Benjy is put into a situation in which the one person who has always actively looked out and fought for him is gone. He is left even more open to the harsh judgment of those around him and is left fully subjected to the harsh Southern views of white masculinity and gender roles. Without the buffer of his beloved sister, he feels his castration even more keenly. Despite everything, Benjy is still painfully aware of certain aspects of his predicament; however, he is helpless to change his fate.

The Relationship Between Benjy and Caddy

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Throughout the April 7th chapter of The Sound and the Fury, there are many moments where we can see the relationship between Benjy and his older sister, Caddy. The close bond that these two characters have is made even more pronounced when one compares the way Benjy acts around Caddy to the way he acts around almost everyone else, save for Dilsey. Caddy and Dilsey are the only people throughout the first chapter of the book that can ever really get Benjy to quiet down. Everyone else tries to, but most times they are unsuccessful and have to end up getting either Caddy or Dilsey.

An example of how Benjy calms down around Caddy can be seen in the scene when Caddy and Quentin are splashing about in the water and Caddy ends up saying that she’ll “run away and never come back” (19). When she says this, Benjy starts to Cry and immediately settles down when Caddy turns to him and tells him to hush. In fact, even the wording used to say Benjy stopped crying is telling of the fact that Benjy listens more to Caddy than anyone else: “Caddy turned around and said ‘Hush’  So I hushed” (19). To me, the wording of this sentence is basically Benjy saying because Caddy told him to hush, he did. He didn’t even hesitate to do as she said, but immediately listened to his older sister.

Another moment where we see Benjy quieting down because of Caddy is a few pages later where they’re eating, and Benjy hears his mother crying and then begins crying himself. In this example, however, Benjy actually doesn’t immediately stop crying when Caddy tells him to. It’s only when Dilsey closes the door and he can no longer hear his mother crying that he stops crying when Caddy tells him to. However, it must also be noted that when Caddy tells him hush for the second time after they can no longer hear their mother crying, his response in quieting down and continuing to eat is immediate. “’Hush, now.’ Caddy said. I hushed and ate” (25). Again, there is no hesitation on Benjy’s part to quiet down when Caddy tells him to, and the only reason he didn’t comply the first time was because he could hear their mother crying. Being just a baby or child during this section, hearing his mother (presumably someone that he felt love and attachment to, even if she wasn’t necessarily all warm and fuzzy with him) crying upset him and probably made him anxious, or possibly scared or worried for their mother.

“symmetrical above the flesh”

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At the end of Quentin’s section of The Sound and the Fury is a flashback to the time when Quentin confessed to his father that he committed incest with his sister. After some back and forth his father finally says:

you are not lying now either but you are still blind to what is in yourself to that part of general truth the sequence of natural events and their causes which shadows every mans brow even benjys you are not thinking of finitude you are contemplating an apotheosis in which a temporary state of mind will become symmetrical above the flesh and aware both of itself and of the flesh it will not quite discard you will not even be dead (242)

What leaps out most from this passage is this use of “apotheosis.” An apotheosis can be understood as the highest exaltation imaginable, to the status of the divine, but this passage includes its own definition: “you are not thinking of finitude,” says Mr. Jason, “you are contemplating an apotheosis,” that is, the inverse, the infinite, that space which exceeds any comprehension and so overwhelms the person with meaning. And, what’s more, this apotheosis is in reference to incest—only not necessarily incest as such but as it sits in Quentin’s head, within a web of signifiers like purity and impurity, masculinity and femininity, father and mother, brother and sister. Apotheosized, these concepts and ideas debilitate Quentin, possess him. Moreover, they find only the slimmest cohesion of meaning in the figure of Caddy, his sister, and not to the benefit of either of them. Quentin invests in Caddy a significance that totally exceeds her as an individual, a significance that cannot be reciprocated by any human being. And that’s exactly what his father is warning him of in this passage.

Caddy, however, isn’t the only one invested with the significance of an apotheosis by Quentin. The word appears first in an earlier part of his section. Leaving the kids looking at the trout to their business, Quentin wanders away and thinks:

I could hear my watch and the train dying away, as though it were running through another month or another summer somewhere, rushing away under the poised gull and all things rushing. Except Gerald. He would be sort of grand too, pulling in lonely state across the noon, rowing himself right out of noon, up the long bright air like an apotheosis, mount into a drowsing infinity where only he and the gull, the one terrifically motionless, the other in a steady and measured pull and recover that partook of inertia itself, the world punily beneath their shadows on the sun. (149)

In this passage Gerald Bland appears as this baroque otherworldly figure, steering his boat in “a drowsing infinity.” He is situated over and against the world, in it but not of it. And for the moment it’s hard to understand why Gerald occupies this space in Quentin’s head, much less why he’s this cherub-like figure in the sky. That is, until the immediately following sentence: “Caddy that blackguard that blackguard Caddy.” This alludes, of course, to Dalton Ames; and so there is revealed a connection between Gerald and Dalton, both of which Quentin believes to possess a power he doesn’t—Dalton because he takes Caddy’s virginity, and Gerald because he is known as a kind of womanizer, or at least Quentin sees him as one. And that’s why it’s not an accident that, trapped in his memory of confronting Dalton, Quentin in reality confronts Gerald (225), because ultimately they represent the same thing, that apotheosized kind of masculinity which he sees beyond his reach because it’s acquired through losing his virginity, virginity, too, heightened to the status of apotheosis.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that when Quentin uses the word apotheosis when thinking about Gerald, he’s thinking about his confession to his father as well, seeing as it’s the only other place in the entire book, or at least in Quentin’s section, where the word appears; and I think that only serves to further punctuate a conceit of Quentin’s that Gerald represents something that Dalton did as well. It’s this conceit, made “symmetrical above the flesh and aware both of itself and of the flesh,” that kills Quentin, that colors the world as inhospitable to him who must attain what is ultimately unattainable.

“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.