1. April 7, 1928 (Holy Saturday): Benjy—33 year-old severely retarded man, the youngest of the Compson children

2. June 2, 1910: Quentin—oldest of the Compson children, a Harvard student, on the day he commits suicide

3. April 6, 1928 (Good Friday): Jason—35 years old, the third of the Compson children

I had already begun to tell it [the story] through the eyes of the idiot child since I felt that it would be more effective as told by someone capable only of knowing what happened, but not why. I saw that I had not told the story that time. I tried to tell it again, the same story through the eyes of another brother. That was still not it. I told it for the third time through the eyes of the third brother. That was still not it. I tried to gather the pieces together and fill in the gaps by making myself the spokesman. It was still not complete, not until 15 years after the book was published when I wrote as an appendix to another book the final effort to get the story told and off my mind, so that I myself could have some peace from it. It's the book I feel tenderest towards. I couldn't leave it alone, and I never could tell it right, though I tried hard and would like to try again, though I'd probably fail again. (Norton 240-41)

It is remarkable that the narrators—Benjy, Quentin, Jason, Faulkner himself—are all male, while the female characters at the heart of the novel—Caddy and her daughter Quentin—are not given the opportunity to narrate for themselves. Also missing from the lineup is the female black servant Dilsey, who is often considered the moral compass of the novel for holding the Compson family together. While it is interesting to ask why Faulkner made these decisions, it is also important to appreciate how powerfully Caddy, the girl Quentin, and Dilsey emerge as complex characters through others' narrations of them—transcending the limitations of these other narrators.

The chronology Faulkner mentions in the above quote appears as “Appendix/Compson: 1699 -1945” in The Portable Faulkner (1946), edited by Malcolm Cowley. It portrays the Compsons as settlers who came to Mississippi from the East, cheated Indians, bought slaves, developed plantations, and realized a dream based on greed, racism, and male honor . The American Civil War (1861-65), which brought an end to slavery, ruined their dream, exposing its falseness. The Compsons never recovered. When asked by an interviewer what the Compsons' problem is, Faulkner replied, “They are still living in the attitudes of 1859 or '60.” In other words, if Caddy and her daughter Quenin are “lost,” it is because they have been rejected by a family wielding an exaggerated sense of male honor as a defense against its inevitable historical decline.

Faulkner derived his title from Shakespeare's Macbeth , where Macbeth reflects: “Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/ And then is heard no more. It is a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing ” (5.5). The reference applies most directly to the “idiot” Benjy's narration, but it can extend to the dramatic “sound and fury” of the other narrators as well.

The Benjy and Quentin sections, especially, place extreme demands on the reader due to their frequent shifts of time frame. Faulkner himself wanted to print the Benjy section in different colors of ink “so that anyone reading it could keep up with who was talking and who was thinking this and what time, what moment in time” (Norton 238). However, with the technology available in 1929, multicolor printing would have cost too much. Instead, Faulkner uses italics, but not quite consistently, to signal time shifts in the Benjy and Quentin sections. A complete key to the novel's time structure is very useful, but is beyond the scope of these notes. For one such key, see the appendix of Edmond L. Volpe's A Reader's Guide to William Faulkne r. New York : Noonday, 1964.

Benjy is observing a game of golf, although he never names the game or shows any understanding of its rules. He observes it entirely from the outside and names only what he sees. The players (“They”) are hitting something, but no golf ball is mentioned here because the ball is not visible, only the swing of the clubs. The flag marks the hole, but the hole is not mentioned because it too is beyond Benjy's vision and knowledge. Luster, the black servant assigned to watch Benjy, is “hunting in the grass”—searching, we later learn, for a quarter he lost.

Benjy's narration is more than a reflection of his limited intellect, and more than a puzzle for readers to solve. It also registers his strong emotional needs and Caddy's position as the lodestone of his interior life. Benjy's need for sensual security and order is evident from the start. He gravitates toward familiar borderlines, landmarks, shapes, smells, and sounds, particularly those associated with Caddy. And Caddy is now gone—cast out by the family for her sexual promiscuity. So Benjy's present experience is inherently mournful, oriented toward a lost past that he continually reclaims. The golf course, for example, was once the Compsons' pasture, which was sold to pay for Quentin's Harvard education and Caddy's wedding. For Benjy the golf course is a kind of living past. The golfers' calls of “caddie” (a caddie is a person who assists a golfer and carries the golf clubs), interpreted by Benjy as “Caddy,” cause him to moan repeatedly. Benjy clings to Caddy's slipper and looks at the reflections of the fire. His mind continually recurs to another scene with a fire: the time, at age five, when he was judged to be retarded and his mother changed his name from Maury (after her brother) to Benjamin (meaning, simply, the lastborn son). From that moment, Caddy began to mother him: “‘He's not too heavy.' Caddy said. ‘I can carry him'” (126).

. . . Caddy knelt and put her arms around me and her cold bright face against mine. She smelled like trees.

Whereas his mother's love is distant, measured, and prescriptive (“poor baby”), his sister's love is spontaneous, selfless, and liberating. Earlier, Benjy notes Caddy's habit of asking what Benjy is trying to say (“What are you trying to tell Caddy” [45]), while others assume he has nothing to say. Benjy's feeling for Caddy is expressed in his repeated association of her with the smell of leaves and trees. She is his life force.

Like his brothers, Benjy takes an interest in preserving Caddy's “natural” state of innocence, though for him this is a matter of creature comfort, not family honor. When Caddy wears perfume for the first time, Benjy moans and will not be consoled until she washes it off. When Caddy emerges from the bathroom, Benjy notices that she “smelled like trees” again (96). Later, he howls in protest when the boy Charlie kisses Caddy on the swing. Caddy takes Benjy back to the house and washes out her mouth with the kitchen soap, whereupon Benjy observes that “Caddy smelled like trees” (105). After Caddy has had sex with Dalton Ames, Benjy senses a change in her and cries. Again, his instinctive desire is for Caddy to wash: he pulls her to the bathroom (135).

It is cruelly ironic that Benjy's longing for Caddy's ongoing innocent presence after her marriage causes him to be castrated as a sexual predator. But this is just what happens. At the gate Benjy watches the schoolgirls passing with their booksatchels (which Caddy herself once carried; see 45), transfixed by his association of them with Caddy. Finding the gate unlocked, he approaches the girls and, catching one of them, he was “trying to say”—that is, trying to ask where Caddy is—but his actions are construed as a sexual attack (110). In the present, castration adds to Benjy's sense of loss: “ I got undressed and I looked at myself, and I began to cry. Hush, Luster said. Looking for them aint going to do no good. They're gone ” (143). Benjy's narration hovers about moments of loss—the loss of his name and of his manhood, the deaths of Damuddy, Quentin, Mr. Compson, and Roskus—but the loss of Caddy is the crisis suffusing the entire section.

“I'm seven years old.” Caddy said, “I guess I know.”

“I'm older than that.” Quentin said. “I go to school. Dont I, Versh.”

By seeking Versh's approval, Quentin and Caddy dramatize how traditional Southern whites construct their identities in relation to their black servants. This is an important theme in the novel, one which Benjy unwittingly but effectively highlights. In the same scene Benjy similarly foreshadows Jason's adult antisocial character, noting that he was playing “by himself further down the branch” (62). Near the end of his narration, Benjy is an uncomprehending witness to the girl Quentin's escape from the Compson home: “ It came out of Quentin's window and climbed across into the tree. We watched the tree shaking. The shaking went down the tree, then it came out and we watched it go away across the grass ” (143). Benjy does not make the connection, as Faulkner did, between Quentin's descent of the tree in the present and Caddy's ascent of the tree in the past, when Damuddy died. He does not need to: for Benjy, both events are part of an ongoing present.

Quentin, the oldest Compson child, narrates the last day of his life leading up to his suicide. Quentin is a freshman at Harvard, and the events take place in and around Cambridge and Boston , Massachusetts . Like Benjy, Quentin is obsessed with Caddy, and a good deal of his narration is an upwelling from the past. However, the contrasts between Quentin's and Benjy's sections are striking. Benjy narrates on his birthday, Quentin on the day of his death. Benjy unconsciously jumbles time as part of a constant present; Quentin consciously manipulates time and attempts to escape it. Benjy thinks literally, Quentin abstractly, as evidenced by the more challenging language and ideas in this section. Quentin's impending death lends a level of intensity and suspense to his narration that is lacking in Benjy's. Whereas Benjy's present activities are casually determined by his attendant Luster, Quentin attempts to impose a clear order on his day—attending to his final affairs, purchasing flat irons to drown himself and depositing them at the designated bridge—but his order is farcically interrupted by external accidents. His ultimate goal to kill himself seems dissociated from his many mundane activities, like putting iodine on a cut, eating breakfast, brushing his teeth. Lost in a world of false ideals, Quentin is out of touch with the true gravity of his suicide.

The unity of Quentin's section is achieved principally through image patterns. The most pervasive image pattern is associated with time. Quentin begins the day by observing a shadow and listening to his watch (an heirloom from his grandfather), both signifying time's passage. The ticking watch conjures “the long diminishing parade of time” leading back to St. Francis and Jesus (149-50). For Quentin, the subtext of all time imagery is his sister Caddy's loss of virginity. Even the reference to St. Francis, who prayed to “Little Sister Death” (150), is associated for Quentin with mourning his own sister's corruption. Mr. Compson advised Quentin to forget about time and “not spend all your breath trying to conquer it” (148). However, reminders of time are everywhere: in clocks, bells, train whistles, and moving shadows. On this final day Quentin will waver between aggression against time and submission to its ungovernable power. He begins by smashing his watch and removing its hands. Later, passing a jewelry shop, he can't resist entering, consulting the proprietor about his broken watch, and looking at “about a dozen watches in the window, a dozen different hours and each with the same assertive and contradictory assurance that mine had, without any hands at all” (170).

Quentin's eyes fix on one watch with hands extended “slightly off the horizontal at a faint angle, like a gull tilting into the wind” (170)—an image introducing a pattern of association between gulls and time. On the Charles River Quentin observes “a gull motionless in midair, like an invisible wire between masts,” and then “three gulls above the stern [of a ship] like toys on invisible wires” (179-80). These seemingly motionless gulls attract Quentin, but even they are subject to time. Time, according to his father, is a “gull on an invisible wire attached through space dragged” (218).

Time is associated with shadows as well. Quentin is haunted by his shadow. As he surveys the Charles River , his enormous shadow extends “[a]t least fifty feet” and he yearns for “something to blot it into the water, holding it until it was drowned” (181). Later he stands on his shadow as he listens to the chimes, and walks “treading my shadow into the pavement” (209). In addition to time, Quentin's shadow also signifies his impending death, which approaches with the forward motion of time: “Niggers say a drowned man's shadow was watching for him in the water all the time” (181).

Another image pattern involves water and its association with death and possible resurrection. Contemplating the river, Quentin imagines debris “healing out to the sea and the caverns and the grottoes of the sea,” in other words, the ultimate peace and oblivion. This recourse to water as escape from reality is already familiar from Benjy's narration, where Benjy seeks to recover Caddy's innocence through cleansing with water. However, Quentin entertains an alternative outcome for death by water: not oblivion but resurrection. At first, he imagines that at the Last Judgment he will be totally disintegrated and “only the flatirons would come floating up” (159). Later, looking into the river from the bridge where he plans to drown himself, he envisions a resurrection that will retain his vision: “And maybe when He says Rise the eyes will come floating up too, out of the deep quiet and the sleep, to look on glory. And after awhile the flat irons would come floating up” (248-49). But Quentin next settles for a natural image associating water with stability: the great old trout, “delicate and motionless among the wavering shadows” (250), that has evaded fishermen for 25 years.

Another pervasive image is the scent of honeysuckle, traditionally representing sexuality—the sexual maturity that Quentin cannot accept.

The people with whom Quentin interacts on his last day spark associations with his personal and family history and with Faulkner's thematic concerns. On the river he sees Gerald Bland rowing. A Southerner from Kentucky , Gerald is encouraged by his mother to play the role of a gentleman. (Rowing on the river is part of this fantasy.) The Blands are extremely proud of their high-class Southern stature, but in contrast to the old and declining Compson family, they are the new rich. Quentin sees them as phonies, but in their superficiality and prejudice they are a more accurate representation of the early Compsons than is Quentin's ideal. He considers Gerald a playboy, at once a threat to women and an insult to true Southern manhood. Quentin associates Gerald with both Herald Head and Dalton Ames, the men he blames for Caddy's loss of innocence. Later he gets in a bloody fight with Gerald, imagining him to be Dalton Ames (335-36). The tension between Quentin and Gerald can be viewed in terms of their relationship with the river: Quentin yearns to enter its depths, while Gerald rows smoothly on its surface.

Deacon, the black man whom Quentin gives a letter to deliver to his roommate Shreve, functions as a sort of “Uncle Tom” servant to young Southern men at Harvard. He satisfies their nostalgia for a black underclass while actually taking advantage of them, bleeding them of money and gifts. Later Quentin leaves behind his clothes, bloodied from combat with Gerald, as a gift to Deacon (“The tie was spoiled too, but then niggers. Maybe a pattern of blood he could call that the one Christ was wearing” [347]). Deacon's character contributes to the novel's broader meditations on Southern race relations. Sitting next to a black man on the city train, Quentin recalls a rustic black man he saw in Virginia on his trip home for Christmas, 1909. That man played a role similar to Deacon's at Harvard: a kind of sign “saying You are home again” (173); the difference is that Deacon constructs the sign intentionally, to benefit himself. Quentin realizes that “a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behaviour; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among” (173). This insight that blacks mirror the dominant white society offers one basis for analyzing the relationships between the Compsons and their servants.

Near the bridge where he buries the flat irons, Quentin encounters three neighborhood boys on a fishing outing. These boys tell Quentin about the old trout. They also speculate freely about how they would spend the $25 prize for the trout, offering Quentin occasion to reflect on the power of language to create reality, an appealing theme for a young man trying to escape his own circumstances: “They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words” (251). On a meta-fictional level, these boys could be seen as representing the three Compson brothers—Benjy, Jason, and Quentin himself—whose words create competing versions of reality in the first three sections of the novel.

Quentin is followed by an Italian girl he meets in a bakery. Attempting to help her get home, Quentin crosses into an immigrant neighborhood. These events shimmer with possible significance. Does Quentin's attachment to an Italian girl signify his increasing alienation from his own family? Quentin calls the girl “sister” (267). Is the girl a reminder of St. Francis's “Little Sister Death,” stalking Quentin on his last day? Or does she, in a sense, stand for his sister Caddy, whose innocence Quentin hoped to defend. Quentin seems aware of the latter significance, when he is arrested for kidnapping the girl and laughs hysterically at the irony that he, of all men, would be so accused.

Throughout the day, amidst these encounters, Quentin's consciousness is overlaid with past events. Most centrally, he remembers Caddy's loss of virginity and his humiliating confrontation with Dalton Ames; his asking Caddy if she loves Ames, and her dramatic response, touching Quentin's hand to her beating heart; and his proposing a suicide pact with her. Fragments of conversations with his father also run through his mind. In one conversation Quentin falsely confesses to his father that he committed incest with Caddy. In another, he tells his father he thinks suicide is courageous, and his father replies that “you are too serious to give me any cause for alarm” (363). He implies that Quentin's contemplating suicide is like his false confession of incest: an “expedient.” Mr. Compson tells Quentin: “you wanted to sublimate a piece of natural human folly into a horror and then exorcise it with truth” (364)—in other words, Quentin commits incest and suicide in his mind so he won't do it in reality. Mr. Compson's remarks fail to appreciate Quentin's desperation; moreover, they consistently show a cynicism in conflict with Quentin's idealism. For example, he tells Quentin that virginity means less to women than to men, and when Quentin protests, he continues: “That's what's so sad about anything, not only virginity. . . . nothing is even worth the changing of it” (155). He claims that emotions are only temporary—that Quentin's outrage at Caddy's lost innocence won't last: “you cannot bear to think that someday it will no longer hurt you like this” (366). An underlying fear that his father is right—that, with time, Caddy might slip from her central place in his consciousness—could be one motivation for Quentin's suicide.

Jason's narration, like Benjy's and Quentin's, establishes a relationship with time. Benjy is oblivious to time. Quentin wants to destroy time. Jason embraces time, but without hope or ideals. “Once a bitch always a bitch,” he begins, referring to Caddy's daughter Quentin. For Jason, time does not bring change, only the monotonous feedback of his selfishness and hatred. Jason harasses Quentin because he is disgusted with Caddy. Like his brothers, he is obsessed with Caddy's sexual conduct—not, like them, because it threatens his identity or ideals, but because it threatens his social position. When Herbert Head abandoned Caddy for having another man's child, Jason lost his claim to the bank job Herbert had promised him. Jason despises his job as an assistant in a hardware store; on the side, he plays the cotton market, losing heavily, and he extorts the money Caddy sends for Quentin, who is now 17 years old. Jason's narration takes place on Good Friday, the day commemorating Christ's death on the Cross. Although he shows now awareness of this holy day, it does have significance to his narration. Jason imagines that he bears the cross of the Compson family—that he suffers for their sins—but in fact his cross is largely one of his own making.

“Good Lord,” I says, “You've got a fine mind. No wonder you kept yourself sick all the time.”

“What?” she says. “I don't understand.”

Jason's insinuation, to his uncomprehending mother, that Caddy and Quentin actually committed incest (they did not, according to Quentin's narration) demonstrates Jason's focus on shadows of the past rather than realities of the present. Although Jason's styles himself as a modern man—a car owner and a stock trader—his jealousies and insecurities make him ineffective and delusional.

The climax of section 4 is the Easter service that Dilsey attends with Luster, Frony, and Benjy. At first glance, the church seems an unpromising place for the spiritual insight Dilsey experiences there: “a weathered church lifted its crazy steeple like a painted church, and the whole scene was as flat and without perspective as a painted cardboard set upon the ultimate edge of the flat earth” (543). Likewise, the visiting preacher Reverend Shegog, a little man with “a wizened black face like a small, aged monkey” (544), is initially a disappointment to the congregation. But like Dilsey's worn-down body at the beginning of the section, he rises to the occasion. His power is his voice. At first Shegog's voice sounds like a white man's, “level and cold” (545). But it develops depth and emotion, echoing in the hearts of the black congregation until “their hearts were speaking to one another in chanting measures beyond the need for words” (546). At some point, unmarked by the congregation, Shegog's voice “became negroid” (548), assuming the pronunciation and intonation of his native black speech. The congregation answers the preacher with affirmative exclamations. By the end Dilsey is in tears, and she continues to cry on the walk home, until she voices her insightt: “I've seed de first end de last. . . . Never you mind me. . . . I seed de beginning, en now I sees de endin” (553). Dilsey's vision could be interpreted as a revelation of Christian history, from the Creation to Last Judgment. It could also be interpreted as her embrace of the Compson's history, from its legendary past glory to its modern fragmentation. This is a history to which her selfless stewardship of the family gives her special access. So interpreted, Dilsey's statement invites the reader back to Shegog's sermon, in which certain details, for example, the “‘weepin en de lamentation of do po mammy'” (550), might apply to the Compson family.

The novel closes with Luster and Benjy's ill-fated journey to the family graveyard. The scene recalls an earlier trip the graveyard in 1913, to visit Mr. Compson's and Quentin's tombs, described by Benjy in section 1 (48-53). In 1913, T.P. drives the carriage pulled by Queenie, and the passengers are Mrs. Compson and Benjy. At the courthouse square, they meet Jason who is, even then, already working in the hardware store. Jason worries that Benjy would begin bawling and embarrass the family in the public square.

Fifteen years later, in 1928, Benjy is the sole passenger (Mrs. Compson stays home) and Luster is driving Queenie. As they approach the Confederate soldier monument on the courthouse square, Faulkner establishes a connection between the “empty eyes” of the soldier statue and Benjy's gaze, “empty and untroubled.” Luster, trying to show off in front of a “group of negroes,” decides to break from routine and turn left, rather than right, at the statue (583). Always sensitive to the form of things, Benjy begins to bellow in a voice that has “more than astonishment in it, it was horror; shock; agony eyeless, tongueless; just sound” (584). Just then Jason steps in to impose order, as he did in 1913. Now, however, he violently reverses their direction, his blows falling on Queenie, Luster, and Benjy alike. It is important to remember that Jason has had a tough day; he is still fuming from Quentin and the showman's theft of his money and his ridiculous pursuit of them. By manhandling Luster and Benjy and cutting short their trip to the cemetery, he is asserting authority where he can. For his part, Benjy appreciates the intervention: “his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and facade flowed smoothly once more from left to right; post and tree, window and doorway, and signboard, each in its ordered place” (585). Together, Jason and Benjy demonstrate that the family is unable to escape its time-worn patterns of thought and behavior.