The Character of Benjy in The Sound and the Fury

The Character of Benjy in The Sound and the Fury

In the short monologue from William Shakespeare’s tragedy, Macbeth, the title character likens life to a “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.” Benjy, a thirty-three year old idiot, begins to relate William Faulkner’s unfortunate tale of the Compson family in The Sound and the Fury. Just as it is a story told by an imbecile, it is one characterized by “sound” and “fury.” Benjy’s meaningless utterances and reliance on his auditory senses, the perpetual ticking of clocks, Quentin’s mysterious bantering, the insignificant accompaniment. Jason’s lust for power and control, the inescapable nemesis of time, Miss Quentin’s rebellious attitude. The Compson family in its entirety is that “poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage.” Their lives are so full of worries, confusion, sound, and fury that life becomes short and unimportant, signifying nothing. However, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is not limited to any one point of view, even to that of Benjy. By delivering his novel from four entirely different perspectives, Faulkner is able to create an intricately woven plot that centers on the only Compson daughter, Caddy, and allows one to crawl inside the minds of his deeply disturbed characters. April seventh, nineteen-hundred-and-twenty-eight…or is it? Benjamin, formerly Maury, presents a disjointed account of his life between his early childhood just around the turn of the century and up until 1910, mainly focusing on his relationship with his sister, Candace. His sense of time is nonexistent: he confuses the past with the present. He is literal: he has no knowledge of connotation. His descriptions are that of a small child and represent the world as it...

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...using this character as the fulcrum of the novel, Faulkner is able to open up the minds of these three young men. The omniscient viewpoint, otherwise known as “Dilsey’s Section,” demonstrates her function as the backbone of the otherwise spineless Compson family, while not compromising Caddy’s connection to each narrator. Aside from addressing the family’s collective ruin, The Sound and the Fury also tracks Caddy’s fateful descent from a beautiful, rebellious young woman into a desperate, selfish outcast. Faulkner purposely includes four different viewpoints in an effort not to allow Caddy to remain beautiful to the reader. Without the deterioration of her pride and charm, the fall of the Compson family would not be complete, for one survivor suggests durability. In fact, the only witness to their tragedy is Dilsey, who, as Faulkner noted, “endured” (Faulkner 348).