Author: William Faulkner
background
- Rashomon style unreliable narration
- Experimental stream-of-consciousness
- Turning point in Faulkner’s self-assessment
- Favorite works
themes
- Dysfunctional family
- Nihilism
- Title borrowed from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “[life] is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing”
- Suicide
- We learn reality through the experiences of someone else’s mind
- Encourages re-reading, figuring things out
plot
- One traumatic event told from four perspectives (three brothers)
- About only girl in family
- Out-of-wedlock pregnancy
- Seen as disaster by family
- Out-of-wedlock pregnancy
- About only girl in family
- Quentin’s section
- Getting ready for suicide
- Defeated idealist
- Traditionalist who does not want a world where “code of honor” has become meaningless
- Code of chastity
- Debt and duty to father
- Does not kill himself sooner
- Harvard
- Sold family last piece of land to pay for tuition
- Finishes first year first
- Traditionalist who does not want a world where “code of honor” has become meaningless
- Stream of consciousness focused on the past
- Time in the Work of Faulkner: “Thus, when Quentin’s memory begins to unravel its recollections … he is already dead.”
- No more tomorrows
- Brothers desperately trying to understand the casting aside of modern femininity by Caddy
- Does not get to tell her story
- Invented conjectures by brothers
- Women as silent center of speculations
- Two lost women: Caddy and daughter
- Novel deliberately constructed around hole
structure
- Non-chronological
- April 7, 1928: Benjy Compson
- Easter Saturday: death and resurrection
- Childlike
- Mental retardation
- Mind of a three-year-old
- June 2, 1910: Quentin Compson
- Suicide
- Going mad
- April 6, 1928: Jason Compson
- Good Friday
- Egotistical bigot
- Sadistic
- Misogynistic
- Shrewd
- Most coherent and easiest to read (ironic)
- “first sane Compson there ever was”
- April 8, 1928: Faulkner narrator
- Easter Sunday
- Third person omniscient narration
questions
- Why are Quentin and Benjy so fixated on Caddy?
- Substitute mother
- Nurture withheld from biological mother
- Self-centered, neurotic
notes
quotes & analysis
It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excrutciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. (50)
Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools. (50)
He said it was men invented virginity not women. Father said it’s like death: only a state in which the others are left. (52)
- The values that Quentin believes no longer have a future
- Does not want to live without belief system
If things just finished themselves. Nobody else there but her and me. If we could just have done something so dreadful that they would have fled hell except us. (53)
But then I suppose it takes at least one hour to lose time in, who has been longer than history getting into the mechanical progression of it. (55)
Because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. (56)
- Philosophy of time
- Chronology versus psychological time
- Quentin breaks his watch
- Psychological time comes alive when the clock stops
- Futility of breaking the watch
- Trying to kill the clock
- Yet it ticks on
- Escape from time
- Wishing for death
- Suicide to reject the future
- Wishing for death
- Trying to kill the clock
I said I have committed incest, Father I said. (77)
- As if incest would make things better
- No shame on family from the outside
- Keeping transgression within family
- Trying to convince both sister and father
- Obsession with honor 🔗 The House of Bernarda Alba
- No shame on family from the outside