The Sound and the Fury

Quentin’s obsession with the watch and with keeping track of the time is the first indication that something is awry: It eventually dawns on the reader that this will be the last day of Quentin’s life, and he is counting down the moments until he will weigh himself down with the flat-irons and jump into the river. When he first arises in the morning, he “touched the watch and turned it face-down and went back to bed” (87). He cannot face what he has decided to do; he wants to turn away from his connection to his family. This gesture is not enough to silence its ominous ticking, however, so Quentin then deliberately destroys its time-keeping capacity. This is significant not only in the allusion to the fact that Quentin’s time is up, but it is also important to note that the object he destroys, or at least incapacitates, is a family heirloom. Quentin’s death by suicide will reverberate beyond his own immediate family, a comment on the decline and likely dissolution of the family line that furthers the theme of Pride Before the Fall.

While most of Quentin’s thoughts are obsessive and bleak, as appropriate to his state of mind, he occasionally indulges in nostalgic thoughts about home, particularly as represented by the Black servants who essentially raised him and his siblings. He thinks about Black people in general terms, espousing theories that are simultaneously disturbing and slightly more tolerant than the other members of his family, and in specific terms. In general, Quentin notes that “I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone” (98). Quentin makes a gesture toward treating people equally, though it is undercut by both an antisocial tendency—he has no real use for other people, at least other than Caddy—and the following sentence wherein he employs a racial slur. He then goes on to advocate an essentializing and infantilizing account of who (or, more problematically, what) Black people are: They possess “that blending of childlike and ready incompetence and paradoxical reliability that tends and protects them it loves out of all reason and robs them steadily and evades responsibility and obligation by means too barefaced to be called subterfuge” (99). This objectifies Black people, denying them full humanity; it essentializes a diverse group, divesting Black people of unique and individual quality; and it elevates Quentin to a position of privilege, as he views Black people with a paternalism that he believes allows him the right to define and judge them as a group. In short, it reveals an insidious racism from which Quentin—and his family—cannot be disentangled. Thus, Quentin’s specific memories of Roskus and Dilsey—Black people he actually knows and for whom he feels affection and nostalgia—are undermined. When he looks out of the train window and sees a Black man on a mule, Quentin thinks this is “like a sign put there saying You are home again” (98). “Home,” in this case, is symbolic of white entitlement, Black labor, and the disparity between white privilege and Black servitude.

Quentin, however, would not think of his views in such terms; he would see his position as one of affection and tolerance. This racial blind spot illuminates the larger family legacy as well as the greater mythology of the South in general. That is, the Compson family wealth originated from the cruel and inhumane institution of slavery, and the family’s downfall is intertwined with the end of such systems. It is also key in understanding Mother’s obsession with reputation and Father’s sardonic pronouncements about the uselessness of time, the dispossession of wealth, and the futility of status. At one point, the Compson family, and other Southern slave-owning families like them, could take for granted their positions of privilege, their exercise of power, and their possession of wealth (which included the possession of other human beings). Now, though, that is all done: In the early decades of the 20th century, they are just like every other Southerner. As one of the boys Quentin encounters describes his speech, “He talks like they do in minstrel shows” (137). Another boy puts it plainly, “You said he talks like a colored man” (137). Not only have the Compsons lost their position of power over Black people, but now they are also conflated with them—equals in an accent that puts them, like Quentin, out of place in the North and even out of time in the modern post-slavery era.

This loss of position reverberates with other indications of the Compson family’s decline. For example, Roskus’s insistence that the family is cursed with bad luck, the prime example of that being Benjy’s developmental limitations: “Can he smell bad luck?” he asks Dilsey. “What they change his name for then if aint trying to help his luck?” (101). Benjy’s extraordinary sense of smell—he catches the scent of death and dishonor easily—cannot defend against Caddy’s defection and Quentin’s decision, just as it cannot change his own fate. His name is changed from Maury to Benjy to preserve Mother’s sense of reputation (Maury is her brother’s name, so she wants to disassociate Benjy’s disability from her family). This is why Mother is so incensed over Caddy’s behavior and why Quentin bears the brunt of Mother’s expectations and disappointments: He attends Harvard because this “has been your mothers dream since you were born and no compson has ever disappointed a lady,” as Quentin recalls Father saying to him (204). He also recalls Mother ranting about her children: “what have I done to have been given children like these Benjamin was punishment enough and now for her to have no more regard for me her own mother” (117). Mother is speaking of Caddy’s transgressions and Quentin’s defense of Caddy; effectively, she sees her children’s expressions of independence as disloyal to her and—more importantly—her reputation.

While Quentin is superficially unmoved by his mother’s faux martyrdom, he still yet harbors a sense of entitlement and status that is represented by his opinions about Black people (as addressed above) as well as in his dealings with Herbert Head. It is not only that he is enamored of his sister Caddy in ways that skirt the boundary of appropriateness, but also that he objects to Head’s coarse nouveau riche ways, which include attempting to bribe Quentin into silence regarding his affair with Caddy. Head also inadvertently casts dispersions on Quentin’s family and heritage, calling the townspeople “hicks” and warning that Quentin has “no future in a hole like this” (124). Quentin, in contrast, possesses an antiquated sense of noblesse oblige, a noble obligation to protect Caddy from “that blackguard” as well as to protect her from herself. This leads to his awkward and inappropriate confession that he and Caddy have committed incest. She is pregnant, presumably by Dalton Ames, and therefore must marry someone, in this case Sydney Herbert Head.

The truth at the heart of this memory is more complicated—Quentin is admitting to incest to keep Caddy from marrying Head—but it is truthful in two senses: one, he did in fact try to convince Father that this was the case; and two, he has most definitely committed incest in his imagination. In Quentin’s memory, Caddy asks Quentin if he has actually had sex; he answers, “yes yes lots of times with lots of girls” (174), which is another lie. He cries “against her damp blouse,” and Caddy pities him (174-75); he cannot have her, and he cannot accept that she will be/has been with other men. Thus, Quentin remembers holding “the point of the knife at her throat” in an aborted attempt to commit a murder-suicide with Caddy (174). She urges him to “push it are you going to,” to which Quentin replies, “do you want me to.” Caddy replies, “yes push it” while Quentin asks her to “touch your hand to it” (174-75). While the conversation is ostensibly about the knife, about the transgression of death, it is arguably symbolic of sex; the knife is a phallic symbol, and the forbidden desire between the two is not merely about wanting to escape into death together. The scene is one in which Eros and Thanatos—erotic love and looming death—are knocking against one another.

Though his death by suicide is not explicitly depicted in the novel, it is clear that Quentin’s intention is to take his own life: If he and Caddy cannot be together, then he can only succumb to suicide, and she had just married Head the week before. The letters he distributes are suicide notes; the symbolic breaking of the watch indicates that his time is up; and his final thoughts are specifically about despair, namely his memories of Father’s comments on it: “no man ever does that under the first fury of despair or remorse or bereavement he does it only when he has realised that even the despair or remorse or bereavement is not particularly important to the dark diceman” (204). That is, a man only commits self-annihilation in the face of his own futility, the acknowledgment that his actions have no impact. Quentin’s death by deliberate drowning underlines the terrible and tragic belief that, for all his passionate yearnings, his life signifies nothing.