The Sound and the Fury

Like alcohol, time itself looms over the Compson family, almost liquid in the way it meanders throughout the book, fluid and without boundaries. While all the first-person narratives jump backward and forward through time, Benjy’s introductory section wanders like a river, changing course in mid-paragraph and sometimes even in mid-sentence. The novel grapples not only with the present but with a generational sense of time, reputations built up over decades and destroyed within a single generation. The book itself spans a period of 18 years (essentially the span of a generation), from the recollection of three days in April 1928 back to one fateful day in June 1910. The sense that time is running out for the Compson family shadows the entire book, especially in Quentin’s narration—whose time is imminently up.

Quentin’s deliberate destruction of the watch is a symbolic act: He is renouncing both himself (he has decided that his time is up) and his family (the watch is a family heirloom). Yet, the reader senses his desperation in his constant keeping of time throughout his narration. It is as if he does not fully want to relinquish his time, or he dreads the countdown to his demise: “The quarter hour sounded. I stopped and listened to it until the chimes ceased” (92). Listening to the passage of time supersedes all other activities, at least for a moment. Later, he “heard a clock strike the hour” (94) and decides that “’I dont need a watch,’” as he says to the clerk who offers to fix his (96). He remembers Father’s pronouncements on time: “Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels, only when the clock stops does time come to life” (97). This illuminates Quentin’s despair in the obsessive counting of the hours; time is already dead to him. Later, he recalls another aphorism of Father’s: “Father said a man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you’d think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune Father said. [...] You carry the symbol of your frustration into eternity” (119). Quentin, indeed, is doomed; his misfortune carries on endlessly—also implying that so too does the generational misfortune.

This motif returns in the final section of the book, as the omniscient narrator connects the inevitable march of time to the irreversible decline of the family: “The clock tick-tocked, solemn and profound. It might have been the dry pulse of the decaying house itself; after a while it whirred and cleared its throat and struck six times” (329). Time here is personified, taking on psychological characteristics (“solemn and profound”) and physical form (“its throat”) to mark the unceasing accumulation of the hours. Just as the Compson family carriage is overtaken by motorists and pedestrians as they head toward the cemetery (370)—another inevitable marker of time’s certain end—so too is the Compson family itself overtaken by the encroaching modern age. Their time has passed.

Many of the characters—mostly male—have much to say about the role of women and sisters. They are both the embodiment of (im)morality—the account of which shifts according to whose perspective dominates—and the locus of (male) control, or lack thereof. They are both monstrous and meek; powerful and weak; objects of desire and subjects of growing independence. It is significant that the three male Compson siblings get narratives of their own, but Caddy is only seen through their eyes. Neither she nor her daughter Miss Quentin gets a first-person narrative of their own. Still, each character is illuminated by the others’ observations of their behavior, especially Caddy, and the conflicting opinions about the appropriate roles of sisters in particular and women in general are never fully resolved.

Mother excoriates Caddy’s behavior throughout the novel and considers her a “fallen woman,” immoral in her sexuality: As Quentin recalls one of his mother’s many tirades, “I was taught that there is no halfway ground that a woman is either a lady or not but I never dreamed when I held her in my arms that any daughter of mine could let herself” (118). The unfinished thought is clear enough, and the dichotomy—“either a lady or not”—is unforgiving. Father, however, has contrasting views: In Quentin’s memory, Father says:

Women are like that they dont acquire knowledge of people we are for that they are just born with a practical fertility of suspicion that makes a crop every so often and usually right they have an affinity for evil for supplying whatever the evil lacks in itself (110).

Father is countering Mother’s suspicions that Caddy is beyond redemption, noting that Mother is focused on gossip and reputation. The takeaway for Quentin is that “Father and I protect women from one another from themselves our women” (110). His benevolent paternalism often reads like over-protective smothering. Caddy squirms beneath his laser-sharp focus.

It also becomes clear to the reader that Quentin’s focus on Caddy degenerates into an unhealthy obsession. He will go so far as to suggest that they have committed incest rather than allow himself to accept that she has engaged in sexual intercourse with other men. His repetitious refrain—“Did you ever have a sister?” (89, 105, 183, 190)—reveals both his fixation on Caddy and his confusion, even despair, over said fixation. He asks the question because he seeks understanding (and absolution, perhaps) for his perceived sins, the taboo of loving his sister in an inappropriate manner. Father attempts to quell Quentin’s unhealthy attachment to Caddy’s activities: “And Father said it’s because you are a virgin: don’t you see? Women are never virgins. Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature. It’s nature is hurting you not Caddy” (132). By their very nature, Father suggests, women cannot be “fallen;” they are already fallen, as it is in or of their very nature. It’s an original take on the notion of original sin.

Quentin’s encounter with the little girl during his wanderings is notable as well. He calls her “sister,” in the parlance of the time, but what might at first seem a casual address takes on significance. This sister—like his own and like women in general—is a foreign entity, ultimately unknowable and mysterious in her motives. This motif could also apply to Jason’s crueler take on women, Caddy and Miss Quentin in particular: “Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say” (206), as he begins his narrative. At the end of his narrative, his position remains unchanged: “Like I say once a bitch always a bitch” (305). Jason’s frustrations with women, however, are derived from what he sees as their essentially unknowable and devious natures; he cannot figure them out, and they thwart his desires, so he writes them off as termagants. Still, Jason’s harsh assessment of women is destabilized by the fact that Miss Quentin eventually escapes his tyrannical, misogynistic control. In addition, it becomes clear that the family name will not be carried on by any of the men—Quentin is dead; Benjy is castrated; and Jason refuses to embroil himself in a personal family life. Thus, the family legacy, for good or for ill, will be carried on by the women and the sisters.