The Sound and the Fury

Benjy’s narrative is at once a confusing collision of multiple events and a display of a much-lauded author’s technique: the use of an allusive stream of consciousness narrative filled with multilayered symbolism and unresolved details draws the reader into a story about the decline of a once-prominent Southern family. While it is initially a difficult read, placing Benjy’s narrative at the forefront of the novel allows the author to explore the myriad ways in which past events impact the present and the presumably dismal future, with consequences that seem preordained. Just as Benjy remembers everything all at once, the Compson family experience its moral and financial decline over and over, with each individual incident contributing to an almost unbearable whole. Benjy himself exists out of time, which allows him to serve as a conduit for highlighting the most important signposts that lead to the inevitable Pride Before the Fall.

For example, any time he hears the golfers call to their caddies, he whimpers and moans: He is still waiting for his sister Caddy to reappear. “Here, caddie,” Benjy overhears a golfer say, and he is immediately admonished by Luster, who has been tasked with watching over him: “’Listen at you, now,’ Luster said, ‘Aint you something, thirty three years old, going on that way’” (3). He becomes agitated every time one of the golfers uses the word that constitutes his sister’s nickname. Caddy herself has been banished from the family for nearly 20 years at this point, but her central significance to Benjy—and to the family’s fate—remains undiminished.

Caddy is portrayed as a free spirit, a headstrong adventurous child who grows into a willful young woman, exploring her sexuality in ways that make Benjy uncomfortable and eventually scandalize the family. In her younger years, however, she is a constant source of comfort for Benjy, as she is the only one of the family who seems to understand him and to love him unconditionally (Dilsey, the Black caretaker tasked with raising the children, also loves Benjy, albeit in a manner suggestive of religious obligation). When Mother infantilizes Benjy, calling him “’My poor baby,’” Caddy balks, claiming him and positioning herself as his protector: “You’re not a poor baby. Are you. Are you. You’ve got your Caddy. Haven’t you got your Caddy” (9-10). Later, as Benjy has another recollection of his childhood, he remembers Caddy saying, “He’s not too heavy [...] I can carry him” (72). The implication is that Benjy is not Mother’s burden to bear—though she uses him for her own emotional self-flagellation—but rather Caddy’s. It is a burden Caddy is willing to bear, until circumstances both within and beyond her control separate them.

Indeed, Caddy’s decision to marry and leave the family represents the equivalent of a broken promise to Benjy, who is unaware of the reasons behind her need to marry and her exile from the family home. She consoles Benjy after she threatens to run away when they are children, defying Quentin’s authority and Jason’s tattle-telling: “’Hush now.’ She said. ‘I’m not going to run away.’” So I hushed” (21). Benjy defers to Caddy, and he innocently believes her. Later, when she is a teenager, she again promises Benjy that she will stay: “’Why Benjy. What is it.’ She said. “You mustn’t cry. Caddy’s not going away’” (48). A few sentences later, she emphasizes her promise, “’Of course Caddy wont. Of course Caddy wont’” (48). Benjy is upset that Caddy has been caught canoodling with other boys, though he does not fully understand the implications of these events. Her activities will eventually lead to her marriage and exile—and thus the broken promise to Benjy—and come to represent the moral decline of the Compson family, at least from the perspective of Mother, highlighting the complicated family dynamics surrounding Women’s Sexuality and Sexual Transgression.

Benjy’s recollections also indicate that the family has suffered financial decline. When he recalls his visit to the cemetery with Mother, for example, Dilsey points out the deteriorating condition of the carriage: “Clare I don’t see how come Jason wont get a new surrey,” she says. “This thing going to fall to pieces under you all some day. Look at them wheels” (10). There are also references to a horse, Fancy, who is no longer with the family, and of a pasture that had to be sold to send Quentin to Harvard. This decline in wealth is linked to the deaths of Damuddy, the family matriarch; the subsequent death by suicide of Quentin; and the eventual death of Father, the result of his alcohol addiction. Benjy, for all his intellectual impairment, is quite intuitive; he senses these events before the others are told: “He know lot more than folks thinks,” the servant Roskus points out. “He knowed they time was coming, like that pointer done. He could tell you when hisn coming, if he could talk. Or yours. Or mine” (36). In this way, Benjy is both a harbinger of death and the embodiment of the family’s decline; his disability renders his ability effectively moot. He is voiceless, helpless to express his knowledge. In fact, Roskus also points out that Benjy’s disability represents the moral decay of the family quite literally: “’Taint no luck on this place,’” he claims, using Benjy’s very presence as proof (33). It is notable that Benjy’s name is changed—he was originally named for his mother’s brother, Uncle Maury—when his disability can no longer be denied.

On the other hand, Benjy’s extraordinary sense of smell can be read as a compensation for what he lacks in intellectual acuity. One could argue that he understands circumstances and events more clearly, more quickly, and more thoroughly than the others. When his mantra that “Caddy smells like trees” (repeated throughout the entire first section of the book) abruptly changes (46), the reader understands what Benjy knows and what the others only suspect: Caddy has engaged in sexual intercourse, losing her symbolic innocence; this is the act that precipitates much of the ensuing downfall. He knows that Damuddy is dead before the others do, as noted above, even as his hero Caddy tries to deny it: “But I could smell it,” he thinks (38). Roskus’s comments allude to the fact that Benjy also sensed Quentin’s untimely demise and his father’s troubled health. Benjy is akin to a doomed prophet, sensing impending disaster as it unfolds but impotent to prevent events from happening and powerless to warn the others.