Quentin Compson's Neurosis, in the Sound and the Fury by W. Faulkner

Quentin’s neurosis: a psychoanalytic interpretation

On looking at The Sound and The Fury, Faulkner’s fourth novel , through the lens of psychoanalytic discourse, we may easily discover that this novel keenly deals with the various psychoanalytical and psycho-sexual problems of the Compsons family; as a matter of fact, Benjy is a congenital moron, Quentin suffers from neurosis and melancholia, and Jason is a monomaniac. However, of the three brothers, Quentin deserves our special attention, for the endeavour of comprehending his psychology is more problematic in comparison to that of Benjy and Jason. Quentin Compson, a Harvard University undergraduate student, is about twenty years old. If we pore over his monologue we perhaps can understand his problems clearly. The second section of the present novel, The Sound and the Fury is illustrated from the perspective of Quentin. Quentin commits suicide on 2nd June, 1910, and this section records the flow of thoughts of his mind with some of his physical actions, before he drowns himself (in the river Charles). Now let’s see how a good tempered, Harvard boy, Quentin would be seized by neurosis and finally be drowned in the river of melancholia. Actually Quentin became obsessed with some of his thoughts: his preoccupations include Caddy’s loss of honour, the decline of the family fortune, the perversion of the moral order in the South, and his father’s absurdist and cynical views of life etc. Like grotesque spiders these social and private aspects were spreading the cobwebs over his brain, and started clouding his sanity and normality. And to add to this crux, he was getting confused at the tussle between two notions –orderly and ideal life, and disorderly and pervert one. His obsession with these issues and consequently becoming of almost a psycho, conjures up the image of Tarak, the protagonist of the recent Bengali film ‘Shabda’ or ‘Sound’. In this film Tarak, a Foley artist is so obsessed with the sounds of the other ‘trivial’ things that he cannot listen to human sounds properly. But he is, obviously, not a deaf. Actually his so much concentration on the other sounds was gradually blocking his ability to hear and decode human articulation and he, gradually, reduced to an abnormal personality; and it finally led him to attempt suicide. Similarly Quentin’s so much brooding over some specific issues blocks his ‘logical’ ways of thinking and makes him a neurotic patient. Quentin is much more preoccupied with Caddy than either of his brothers, because she represents so much more to him. In Caddy he is trying to understand the concept of family, of honour, and of sexuality. She is to him—his sister, mother and beloved—all in one in different times. She is the Sun of his planet. So he is very possessive of her and that’s why he cannot put up with neither her love affair with Dalton Ames nor her marriage with Herbert Head; and when he comes to know her promiscuous nature something gets shattered in his heart, -- it left eternal sores in his heart. He is so possessive of her that when he comes to learn about caddy’s proposed marriage, he starts thinking that, as they cannot inhabit together in the sublunary world henceforward, they would dwell in hell together with its purifying fire: “If it could just be a hell: the clean flame the two of us more than dead. Then you will have only me then only me then two of us amid the pointing and the horror beyond the clean flame.” (Page no. 98-Vintage Books)
It is note-worthy that the reference of hell suggests his Thanatos or the desire for death. Quentin is over protective towards her sister, and probably so he wants to deem himself as a strong man. But through some mishaps his illusion gets annihilated. Dalton Ames once beat him by holding his both wrists in his (Dalton) one hand. Gerald also soaked and injured him vehemently. These incidents --- blow his false notion of considering himself as strong and protective, contribute to his morbidity, and evoke his desire for castration: “Verse told me about a man who mutilated himself went into the woods and did it with a razor...”(page no 97- Vintage Books). And finally when he comes to know that Caddy’s husband has deserted her, he feels that he is not at all protective to save his sister’s honour and perhaps so he proceeds to the final doom; because breaking of the illusion is unbearable to him. A major problem of Quentin is that he is always confused -- he hovers helplessly at the middle in the tug of war between ‘order’ and ‘chaos’. One day he takes Caddy to the woods and plots of a murder-suicide pact. In this scene if the “knife” is considered to be the phallic symbol; Quentin obviously nourishes the desire for sex with her sister, attempts to do it, but finally fails in his endeavour. Though Caddy says to ‘push it harder’, he cries out and drops it. The conflict between his desire for intercourse with his sister and his moral scruple makes his heart weak and tears come out of his heart. The confusion of his self deepens by his father’s nihilistic and absurdist philosophy. Quentin believes life to be a significant and orderly thing but his father finds no worthy significance in it: “Any live man is better than any dead man but no live or dead man is very much better than live or dead man.” Quentin sees virginity as a solemn aspect, but to his father it is a society-made artificial thing. Quentin does not want to believe his father but perhaps finally he realizes that his father has been right, perhaps he finally comprehends that absurdity is life; and the idealist Quentin to shun this absurdism of worldly life leaves the world. His confusing state of mind is very obvious also in the last scene of the second section: even before committing suicide he packs his bag, bathes and shaves. This proves his desire ‘order’ even in the realm of utmost ‘disorder’. Quentin is also preoccupied with his family honour. The Compsons family, once, enjoyed a most respectable position in the South of America, but now this family is undergoing a severe decline; social, economic and moral. Quentin is the only member in this family who is concerned about it and he wants to uplift it to its previous precious position. This is the driving motivation when he claims to his father that he has committed incest with his sister. ‘Though he has a strong obsession with Caddy his claim of incest is not out of his sick perversion, it is because he thinks it would be better than having Caddy be seen as promiscuous and degrade their family honour’ (Charlotte V). “The better prophet and inflexible corruptless judge”, Quentin is in vain to raise the family-honour and when he faces the utmost moral decline of the family his mental equilibrium gets trembled. Exhausted with thousands of anxieties and confusions, Quentin wants to stop time by breaking the hands of the watch his father gave him, but is unable to free himself from the unavoidable passage of Time: the clicking sound of the watch haunts him incessantly. So finally he quits himself from the realm of Time. Finally, it is worth mentioning that had his mother been a caring and responsible figure, Quentin would not have been so obsessed with his sister, nor would have his sister been promiscuous in nature. Quentin perhaps realizes this, and so “he cries out if I could have mother”. The life and suicide of Quentin conjures up to our mind the persona in Jibanananda Das’s poem ‘One Day Eight Years ago’ (Aat Bochhor Ager Akdin). The anonymous persona in this poem has his own loving family and he is without any financial hurdle. But an inexplicable perilous wonder always haunts him in his sleepless nights, and finally to escape from this strange situation he hangs himself:

“...there is some other baffling surprise that whirls in our veins; It tires and tires, and tires us out; but there is no tiring in the post mortem cell and so, there he rests, in the post mortem cell flat on the dissection table.” (Translated by F. L. Latif)
Similarly in the present novel Quentin has always been haunted by one kind of ‘bippanno bishway’ or baffling surprise that drives him to jump in the river.