Professor Rettura
Survey to American Literature
Nijee Warfield
11/22/13
Professor Returra
Final Paper
The Sound and the Fury
The Sound and The Fury is unique and strange novel. Each of the chapter or parts are written from a first person view. Its context is written from four different prospective, that of the three Compson brothers and one through Faulkner’s own eyes, but he seems to focus on Dilsey, the Compson’s cook. Dilsey takes a great part in raising the Compson children. The story seems to focus on the Compson brothers; Jason, Benjy and Quentin and their obsession of their sister Caddy, who seems somewhat promiscuous.
Benjy tells the first part of the story from his prospective. This prospective is the most difficult to understand, due to the fact that he is severely retarded. Benjy has no perspective of time, cause or effect which is why he portrays all is past events in present time. Benjy is also completely dependent on Caddy for support and affection and has the unique ability to sense when something is wrong or something bad is going to happen. Which is why he could sense Quentin suicide and when Caddy loses her virginity.
In Benjy’s prospective, he and a boy he named Luster, who is looking after Benjy, are walking around the Compson looking for a quarter Luster has lost. Luster plans to buy a ticket to the Minstrel in the town of Jefferson that Weekend. It is Benjy’s thirty-third birthday and Dilsey, the Compson’s cook has baked him a cake, which another reason why Luster is taking Benjy on this adventure, to keep him away from the kitchen. When Luster fails at finding the quarter, he decides to go to the nearby golf course, to salvage golf balls from the rough to sell back to the golfers. (Note, that the gold course use to be a part of the Compson estate, they sold it off to pay for Quentin’s tuition to Harvard.) A nearby golfer calls out for his caddie, when he does this Benjy hears it he moans, because it
Cited: Faulkner, W. (1994). The sound and the fury: An authoritative text, backgrounds and contexts, criticism. New York: Norton.