Part 4: April 8, 1928
April 8, 1928, is Easter Sunday. This section, the only one without a single first-person narrator, focuses on Dilsey, the powerful matriarch of the Black family servants. She, in contrast to the declining Compsons, draws strength from her faith, standing proud amid a dying family. On this Easter Sunday, Dilsey takes her family and Benjy to the «colored» church. Through her we sense the decay and depravity which have ripened in the Compsons for decades. Dilsey is mistreated and abused, but remains loyal. She and her grandson Luster tend to Benjy as she takes him to church and tries to bring him to salvation. The preacher’s sermon makes her weep for the Compson family, whose destruction she is now witnessing.
Meanwhile, the tension between Jason and Miss Quentin reaches its inevitable conclusion. The family discovers that Miss Quentin has run away in the night with a carnival worker, having taken the strongbox in which Jason had hidden all his savings, both earned and stolen. Jason complains to the sheriff, who is sympathetic to Miss Quentin and refuses to help. Since much of the money had been embezzled from Miss Quentin, Jason doesn’t press the issue. He sets off to find her on his own, but loses her trail in nearby Mottson and gives up.
After church, Dilsey allows her grandson Luster to drive Benjy in the family’s decrepit horse and carriage to the graveyard. Luster, disregarding Benjy’s set routine, drives the wrong way around a monument, provoking Benjy into hysterical sobbing. Jason suddenly appears, slaps Luster, turns the carriage around, and, in an attempt to quiet the sobbing, hits Benjy and breaks his flower stalk, screaming «Shut up!» After Jason gets off and Luster heads home, Benjy falls silent. Luster turns around to look at Benjy and sees him holding his drooping flower, his eyes «empty and blue and serene again.»
Appendix: Compson: 1699–1945
In 1945, Faulkner wrote an appendix to the novel to be published in the then-forthcoming anthology The Portable Faulkner, edited by Malcolm Cowley. At Faulkner’s behest, subsequent printings of The Sound and the Fury frequently contain the appendix at the end of the book; it is sometimes referred to as the fifth part. Written sixteen years after The Sound and the Fury, the appendix shows textual differences from the novel, but serves to clarify the novel’s opaque story.
The appendix is presented as a complete history of the Compson family lineage, beginning with the arrival of their ancestor Quentin Maclachlan in America in 1779 and continuing through 1945, including events that transpired after the novel (which takes place in 1928). In particular, the appendix reveals that Caroline Bascomb Compson died in 1933, at which time Jason had Benjy committed to the state asylum in Jackson, fired the Black servants, sold the last of the Compson land, and moved into an apartment above his farming supply store. It is also revealed that Jason had himself declared Benjy’s legal guardian many years ago, without their mother’s knowledge, and used this status to have Benjy castrated.
The appendix also reveals the fate of Caddy, last seen in the novel when her daughter Quentin is still a baby. After marrying and divorcing a second time (to a «minor moving picture magnate» in Hollywood), Caddy moved to Paris, where she lived at the time of the German occupation. In 1943, the librarian of Yoknapatawpha County discovered a magazine photograph of Caddy in the company of a German staff general and attempted separately to recruit Jason and Dilsey to save her:
Jason, at first acknowledging that the photo was of his sister, denied it after realizing that the librarian wanted his help, while Dilsey pretended to be unable to see the picture at all. The librarian later realized that while Jason remains cold and unsympathetic towards Caddy, Dilsey simply understands that Caddy neither wants nor needs to be saved from the Germans, because nothing else remains for her.
The appendix concludes with an accounting for the Black family who worked as servants to the Compsons. Unlike the entries for the Compsons themselves, which are lengthy, detailed, and told with an omniscient narrative perspective, the servants’ entries are simple and succinct. Dilsey’s entry, the final in the appendix, consists of two words: «They endured.»
Characters
Jason Compson III – father of the Compson family, a lawyer who attended the University of the South: a pessimist and alcoholic, with cynical opinions that torment his son Quentin. He also narrates several chapters of Absalom, Absalom!
Caroline Bascomb Compson – wife of Jason Compson III: a self-absorbed neurotic who has never shown affection for any of her children except Jason, whom she seems to like only because he takes after her side of the family. In her old age she has become an abusive hypochondriac.
Quentin Compson III – the oldest Compson child: passionate and neurotic, he commits suicide as the tragic culmination of the damaging influence of his father’s pessimistic philosophy and his inability to cope with his sister’s sexual promiscuity. He is also a character in Absalom, Absalom! The bridge over the Charles River, where he commits suicide in the novel, bears a plaque to commemorate the character’s life and death.
Candace «Caddy» Compson – the second Compson child, strong-willed yet caring. Benjy’s only real caregiver and Quentin’s best friend. According to Faulkner, Caddy is the true hero of the novel. Caddy never develops a voice; rather, her brothers’ emotions towards her provide the development of her character.
Jason Compson IV – the bitter, openly racist third child who is troubled by monetary debt and sexual frustration. He works at a farming goods store owned by a man named Earl and becomes head of the household in 1912. Has been embezzling Miss Quentin’s support payments for years. To Faulkner, Jason represented «complete evil».
Benjamin (nicknamed Benjy, born Maury) Compson – the mentally-disabled fourth child, who is a constant source of shame and grief for his family, especially his mother, who insisted on his name change to Benjamin. Caddy is the only family member who shows any genuine love towards him. Luster, albeit begrudgingly, shows concern for him occasionally, but usually out of obligation. He has an almost animal-like «sixth sense» about people, as he was able to tell that Caddy had lost her virginity just from her smell. The model for Benjy’s character may have had its beginning in the 1925 New Orleans Times Picayune sketch by Faulkner entitled «The Kingdom of God».
Dilsey Gibson – the matriarch of the servant family, which includes her own three children — Versh, Frony, and T.P. — and her grandson Luster (Frony’s son); they serve as Benjamin’s caretakers throughout his life. An observer of the Compson family’s decline.
Miss Quentin Compson – daughter of Caddy, whom the Compsons take in when Herbert divorces Caddy. She is wild and promiscuous and eventually runs away from home. Often referred to as «Quentin II» or «Miss Quentin» by readers to distinguish her from her uncle, for whom she was named.
Style and structure
The novel’s episodes follow the three days of Easter. The four parts of the novel relate many of the same episodes, each from a different point of view and therefore with emphasis on different themes and events. This interweaving and nonlinear structure makes any true synopsis of the novel difficult, especially since the narrators are all unreliable in their own way, making their accounts not necessarily trustworthy at all times.
Also in this novel, Faulkner uses italics to indicate points in each section where the narrative is moving into a significant moment in the past. The use of these italics can be confusing, however, as time shifts are not always marked by the use of italics, and periods of different time in each section do not necessarily stay in italics for the duration of the flashback. Thus, these time shifts can often be jarring and confusing, and require particularly close reading.
The Sound and The Fury
When Faulkner began writing the story that would develop into The Sound and the Fury, it «was tentatively titled ‘Twilight,’ and narrated by a fourth Compson child,» but as the story progressed into a larger work, he renamed it, drawing its title from Macbeth’s famous soliloquy from act 5, scene 5 of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth:
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
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.
Immediately obvious is the notion of a «tale told by an idiot,» in this case Benjy, whose view of the Compsons’ story opens the novel. The idea can be extended also to Quentin and Jason, whose narratives display their own varieties of idiocy. More to the point, the novel recounts «the way to dusty death» of a traditional upper-class Southern family. The last line is, perhaps, the most meaningful: Faulkner said in his Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech that people must write about things that come from the heart, «universal truths.» Otherwise, they signify nothing.
Reception
Upon publication the influential critic Clifton Fadiman dismissed the novel, arguing in The Nation that «the theme and the characters are trivial, unworthy of the enormous and complex craftsmanship expended on them.» But The Sound and the Fury ultimately went on to achieve a prominent place among the greatest of American novels, playing a role in William Faulkner’s receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in