Quentin's Passion and Desire in The Sound and the Fury
As Quentin Compson travels through the countryside with his college friends, the reality of the situation becomes terribly confused by memories and past feelings. After a little girl follows him for miles around town, his own sexuality reaches the forefront of his consciousness and transforms itself into disjointed memories of his sister Caddy. Quentin's constant obsession in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, surrounds a defining sexual act with his sister. Though the physical act never appears in plain language, Quentin's apparent lapse into an inner monologue demonstrates his overwhelming fixation with Caddy as well as a textured representation of their relationship. Sexual language pervades his inner consciousness - scents, sounds and colors represent his passion and desire. Elements of nature, when associated with his sister, become erotic; the tiers of description, no matter how seemingly mundane, tend to be steeped in sexuality.
Quentin's lapse into past events with Caddy begins in the midst of typical conversation with his friends as they drive through town. His attention to reality is shattered by an unconscious slip into thoughts of his sister. As the eyes of the little girl snap Quentin into a reverie of sexual exploration, his words wander haphazardly, even before the image of his sister, prone on the banks of the river, comes to mind. "If I tried to hard to stop it I'd be crying and I thought about how I'd thought about I could not be a virgin, with so many of them walking along in the shadows and whispering with their soft girlvoices lingering in the shadowy places and the words coming out and perfume and eyes you could f...
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... environment to evoke such passion. Although Faulkner rarely refers to sexual acts directly, the use of language through Quentin's consciousness and internal monologue is so rampant with erotic metaphor and passionate depth, that a simple object, such as a pocket knife, transforms into the most vital of symbols.
Works Cited and Consulted
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage Books, 1984.
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16. James Hinkle and Robert McCoy, Reading Faulkner: The Unvanquished. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 141.
This scene from William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury illustrates Faulkner’s incredible talent for storytelling that has enabled him to trap readers and critics in his spectrum of characters for decades. Weaving intense characters together with stories of despair and triumph, Faulkner produces a tapestry that blankets readers with his love/hate relationship with the South. However, in his novel The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner employs a vastly different method of creation. This story unfolds as a patchwork of chronological events told through the experiences, memories, and interpretations of three brothers infatuated and obsessed with the actions and absence of their sister, Caddy. Consisting of a multitude of colors laid out by Caddy’s actions and her brothers’ reactions, Faulkner’s true patchwork genius lies in the craftsmanship of his seam. Binding together multi-colored material created by similar experiences, Faulkner’s stitching takes on a radically different, almost haphazard appearance. With each Compson brother producing a different type of stitching due to vastly different interpretations of their s...
George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” is a short story that not only shows cultural divides and how they affect our actions, but also how that cultural prejudice may also affect other parties, even if, in this story, that other party may only be an elephant. Orwell shows the play for power between the Burmese and the narrator, a white British police-officer. It shows the severe prejudice between the British who had claimed Burma, and the Burmese who held a deep resentment of the British occupation. Three messages, or three themes, from Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” are prejudice, cultural divide, and power.
The state of power established through the imperialistic backdrop show that Orwell should have control over the Burmese. Orwell is a British colonial officer in Burma, which is under the control of the British, and because of this he should have authority and control over the Burmans. The presence of the empire is established when Orwell explains that, “with one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny...upon the will of the prostrate people; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s gut.” (144) This ideal imperialistic circumstance, where ...
Faulkner, Howard, and Theresa L. Stowell. "Richard Wright." Critical Survey Of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition (2010): 1-9. Literary Reference Center. Web. 5 Mar. 2014.
or hundreds of years people have considered capital punishment a deterrence of crime. Seven hundred and five individuals have died since 1976, by means of capital punishment; twenty-two of these executions have already occurred this year (Death Penalty Information Center). Many U.S. citizens who strongly support the death penalty believe that capital punishment remains the best way to protect society from convicted killers. I, however, disagree; I do not feel that execution best punishes criminals for their acts. Instead, in my opinion, the administration of the death penalty should end because it does not deter crime; it risks the death of an innocent person, it costs millions of dollars, it inflicts unreasonable pain; and most importantly it violates moral principles.
Three key elements link William Faulkner's two short stories "A Rose for Emily" and "Dry September": sex, death, and women (King 203). Staging his two stories against a backdrop of stereotypical characters and a southern code of honor, Faulkner deliberately withholds important details, fragments chronological times, and fuses the past with the present to imply the character's act and motivation.
The most prevalent example of tyranny harming both oppressor and oppressed in recent reading is Frederick Douglass’ piece, “Learning to Read and Write.” Douglass explains how his mistress was initially kind and tender-hearted, but being a slave owner transformed her into a monster. Having to exert the kind of cruel power that she did turned her cold and evil. She grew to fit the mask of slavery and became something she originally was not. It is in the same way which Orwell grows to fit the mask of his role as the white man in the Burmese village. He is supposed to show no fear or cowardice, so he shoots the innocent elephant. Orwell’s behavior acts as a mask of his true emotions - he clearly knew he ought not to shoot the elephant, but his role in the village meant he had to. This showcases the irony of how Orwell is the central power in the village, but crowd psychology has forced into doing something he would rather not. Douglass and Orwell, while from very different places and very different ends of the spectrum of totalitarianism, make virtually the same observation: by the end of his reign, a tyrant will be just as broken as the subjec...
William Faulkner uses multiple narrators throughout The Sound and the Fury to depict the life of Caddy Compson without telling the story from her point-of-view. Benjy, a mentally disabled 33 year old, Quentin, a troubled and suicidal Harvard student, and Jason, a racist and greedy man, each give their drastically different sides of Caddy’s story to create an incomplete chronicle of her life. Faulkner’s first chapter explores Caddy’s life through the silent narrator Benjy. As a result of Benjy’s inability to talk, much of how he describes the world is through his heightened sensory awareness. Benjy constantly repeats the fact that, which, to Benjy, symbolizes Caddy’s innocence (Faulkner 6). Later in the novel when, Benjy realizes that Caddy has lost the innocence Benjy once idolized and loved (Faulkner 40).
In “Shooting an Elephant” writer George Orwell illustrates the terrible episode that explains more than just the action of “shooting an elephant.” Orwell describes the scene of the killing of an elephant in Burma and reveals a number of emotions he experienced during the short, but traumatic event. Effectively, the writer uses many literary techniques to plant emotions and create tension in this scene, leading to an ironic presentation of imperialism. With each of the realistic descriptions of the observing multitude and the concrete appeal of the narrator’s pathos, Orwell thrives in persuading the audience that imperialism not only has a destructive impact on those being governed under the imperialists’ oppressive power, but also corrupts
The death penalty is the only punishment in some criminal cases. Society feels as though justice is served when criminals receives what is deserved of them. Most people agree that justice is served when the punishment fits the crime.” The death penalty in the U.S is used almost exclusively for the crime of murder. Although state and federal statutes contain various capital crimes other than those involving death of a victim. Only two people were on death row for a non-murder offense, when the U.S. Supreme Court addressed this issue of 2008. No one has been executed for such a crime since it was reinstated in 1976”. No one has been executed since 1976. The death penalty is probably the best choice of some of the corrupted people out here since some of them can make it in and out of prison no problem and still commit crimes.
By reading closely and paying attention to details, I was able to get so much more out of this story than I did from the first reading. In short, this assignment has greatly deepened my understanding and appreciation of the more complex and subtle techniques Faulkner used to communicated his ideas in the story.
"William Faulkner (1897-1962)." Short Story Criticism. Ed. Jelena Krstovic. Vol. 97. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2007. 1-3. Literature Criticism Online. Gale. Hempfield High School. 31 March 2010.
In colonial Burma, the foreign, British minority ruled the large, local majority. In this setting, the British demonstrated its dominance and power through its gruesome treatment of the Burmese. Orwell described the locals as having “cowed faces” and “scarred buttocks” from Britain’s “unbreakable tyranny”. This exemplifies the typical imperialistic state- an oppressor and an oppressed. However, Orwell’s depiction of imperialism goes deeper than such a simplistic view. Orwell, who