Jason Sucks.

I’m pretty sure that when Jason so blatantly points out that “Once a bitch, always a bitch,” he’s definitely referring to himself. Even from the cradle, he’s known to be a little tattle tale--making sure to tell on Caddy every chance he gets. He also starts swindling his friends at an early age which isn’t exactly the nicest thing to do. And then? Well, he grows up to be a holier-than-thou buttface who’s racist, sexist, and uncomfortably creepy towards his niece, mother, and the rest of his family.

Alright, so let’s go along with my super exciting Hamlet analogy! After giving this some more serious thought, I realized that Caddy isn’t actually Ophelia or Gertrude in this situation--she’s Hamlet, herself. Because of her forbidden tastes of life, she figures that she has to rebel against her own family in order to fulfill her own sense of justice. Even though Quentin goes on long, spiralling rants about time, suicide and sexuality, he’s actually a lot more like Ophelia: after being rejected by the person he loves most in the world (in a non-sexual way--I’m pretty convinced that he has no incestuous feelings towards Caddy) and while losing the respect of his father, he realizes that the only way to escape his own madness and fear is to jump into a river and kill himself. After this, we forget about Laertes--the man who has a sword with a poison tip in hopes of killing Hamlet. Laertes is certain that Hamlet is the one who causes the death of both his father and sister (whom he loves very dearly), and this drives him to turn against Hamlet who he had always admired. Boy, who does this sound like? Definitely Jason. Although, Jason is a lot less relatable than Laertes as a character, considering he sucks. Which, in this little analogy, uncomfortably enough, makes Missy Q Gertrude. But wait a minute! She didn’t come into the story until much later!!!

Hamlet is completely overprotective of Gertrude but is unable to really be there for her since she was taken away from him by Claudius (or Miss Cah-line--or maybe time itself? I’ll think about this more). In a way, Missy Q is the largest downfall of the Compson family--she’s proof that they’re turning into the impoverished white trash family they’ve always feared of becoming. Therefore, everyone is trying to decide what is best for her, instead of letting her mother take care of her. And whoops--she’s actually left in the hands of her creepy, sexist and aggressive uncle, Jason, who is personally stealing the money her mother sends her every month to use for his own enjoyment. But wait a minute, hold the phone, this is seriously starting to sound like Scar’s song from The Lion King as he tries to take over more of the Animal Kingdom! Well, Elton John confuses some of the lines there. But here’s a link for background music as we dive into Jason’s character a little bit more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkU23m6yX04 .

As I mentioned before, Jason’s always been known to be the least liked of the four Compson children. Caddy always felt extreme love for Benjy, Quentin and Caddy shared an extremely special bond, and Quentin could put up with Benjy for Caddy’s sake: but where did that leave poor little Jason? Absolutely nowhere. He had to begin to find new friends by himself, beginning to rely on money to bring him the happiness he craved from his family. However, even as he grew to become the favorite of his parents (especially his mother), he began to crave the attention of his siblings. Due to his own personal neurotic and obsessive complexes when it came to his self-image and the image of the family, his most important idol naturally became his older brother, Quentin. However, after losing the only person that he really looked up to (and realizing that the money the Compsons spent on Quentin’s Harvard education--or the education that could have potentially been Jason’s), it seriously made him grow bitter. But that’s really no excuse for the terrible person he is. He’s really just a spoiled brat when it all comes down to it--he hates everyone around him and refuses to do anything for them, even though he knows they’re in trouble.

His treatment of his elderly mother and teenage niece are prime examples of how Disney-esque Jason really is--from being verbally to physically abusive, the reader is immediately aware of his rotten nature. Like Quentin, he is constantly living in the past, and regretting the decisions of the family. However, unlike Quentin, he’s always got someone else to blame for all of his problems. Honestly, I’d rather never talk or think about Jason again, so I’m gonna leave it here, until I can scrounge up more info on the subject.

Quentin Compson: Incest, Shakespeare, AND MORE!

Okie dokie, let’s chat about Quentin Compson, shall we? Honestly, he’s probably the most relatable character in the story so far, even though he is technically less mentally capable than his brother because *SPOILER ALERT* he eventually kills himself. His section is retold the day after his death, as he recounts the events that lead to him jumping off of a bridge. Well, it’s pretty obvious to the reader that his life was no walk in the park, right? So let’s list some problems that Quentin clearly has!

1. He’s extremely neurotic and obsessive-compulsive. He is extremely obsessed over his own self-image, along with the image of his family, and especially the image of his sister, Caddy. (AND SO SHE APPEARS AGAIN! Get used to it. We’re going to be talking about her a LOT in this blog post.)
2. He’s got some serious Mommy and Daddy issues that skip hand-in-hand with his OCD and neurotic tendencies.
3. My personal favorite, the big question mark on Quentin’s sexuality!

So, Quentin’s supposed to be the Golden-Boy of the Compson family. He’s a Harvard student that they weigh everything upon, which agonizes him and only increases his neurotic tendencies, especially when he begins to live in the past, instead of focusing on his presence. This stems from his Dad’s weird phobia of time--he believes that you cannot really escape time. When he tells Quentin this, naturally, the man considers it to be a challenge that he has to accept. Ironically enough, Quentin is eventually stuck in time, since this entire chapter is told ten years before the present, showing that even through death, Quentin could not really escape it.

While living most of his life in the past, he becomes increasingly worried about how women in the world are being treated. While living in a small home without many women, he came to understand his sexual identity through his sister. Quentin feels as though every person is technically someone else’s sister, and found himself constantly defending the honor of women, and getting beaten because of it multiple times.

Another thing that worries Quentin is his masculinity. He constantly wants to be more like his father, but his brother, Jason is always getting the better end of the bargain. This is established by the fact that Jason is also Mr. Compson’s name, and so they share the same amount of masculinity. Meanwhile, Caddy names her daughter after Quentin, which displays a pretty effeminate depiction of Quentin as a character. However, Quentin does have an excessive adoration for Caddy, which would portray the name of her daughter in a positive light, in regards to her brother.

When Mr. Compson finally finds out about Caddy’s pregnancy, Quentin tries to defend her, saying that they committed incest and that the child was his, in hopes that she could remain happy with her beau, Dalton. This of course, doesn’t really work out, considering that Quentin is most definitely a virgin.

But he does spend a loooot of time thinking about Caddy.

In fact, he is completely repulsed by the loss of her innocence because of his obsession with her image. He feels like he needs to constantly protect her, because without his protection, she would lose herself entirely. Of course, being the adorable lil spitfire Caddy is, she wouldn’t deal with any kind of crap from Quentin, no-sir-ee. Unfortunately for Quentin, that just drove him closer to the edge of insanity. Eventually, he realized that time is what corrupted people, and that the only way for him to escape time was to kill himself. And so, that’s exactly what he did.

The title of  The Sound and The Fury comes from a line in MacBeth by William Shakespeare, but I personally affiliate Quentin with Hamlet. If you’ve been living under a rock for your entire life, let me explain that Hamlet was insanely worried about self image, the sexual affairs of his mother, and time itself. That seems to be pretty similar to Quentin’s situation, right? Hamlet is arguably Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy, and I can’t help but see similarities in both of the characters. Although I’d like to write a more in depth essay on this subject, you can find more info here:

https://archive.org/stream/QuentinCompsonAndHamletAStudy/QuentinCompsonAndHamlet_djvu.txt

The most prominent question that arises in this chapter, however, has to do with Quentin’s sexuality. Does he really have sexual feelings towards Caddy? Personally, I think that Quentin is a homosexual. Although Faulkner never openly touched on the subject, Quentin’s sexual vulnerability seems to stem from something deeper than a strange respect for his sister. He is constantly worried about displaying his masculinity and about his self image--could it be that he’s trying to hide something? Sure, it could be incest. But when he has such a close relationship with his roommate, Shreve, that seems pretty unlikely. I’d like to do a more in depth essay on this as well, since there’s a lot more information I’d like to find before explaining this further.

Personally, I think Quentin might be the most interesting character in the novel. His stream of consciousness is enthralling, along with his weirdly relatable obsessions. I would really like to do more research on this character as I can find more. But until then? Let’s start reading about Jason. Great.

Pushing Benjy-man's Buttons

After numerous attempts at trying to get this freaking assignment to load, I realized that there was only one REAL thing I could do. Reread the Benjy section. I hadn’t really paid attention at first, Faulkner’s writing definitely proved my theory, and I found myself almost as frustrated with the text as I currently am with my computer loading assignments onto blogspot.com. Anyway, my extreme disapproval of my own skills at modern technology aside, I had a Faulkner-esque revelation: I had to reread the chapter, because there had to be a reason for my assignment to freak out, right? Turns out, this hypothesis proved to be correct! There was something extremely vital that I had missed in this section.

Let’s get started by doing a quick summary of Benjy’s character and the chapter as a whole. Benjy Compson comes from an aristocratic Southern family which--surprise, surprise--has a remarkable similarity to the home which Faulkner most likely grew up in. The Compsons are pretty gosh darn dysfunctional, this much is obvious, even from Benjy’s perspective. Mrs. Compson (Benjy’s mother) is neurotic, Mr. Compson (Benjy’s father) is obsessive, Quentin is the epitome of every neurotic and obsessive nerve in his father and mother, but multiplied by twenty, Jason (Another of Benjy’s brothers) is constantly trying to steal the family wealth like some sort of Rocky and Bullwinkle villain, and Candice (AKA “Caddy”, Benjy’s sister) is constantly trying to be more of a rebel, but she’s also seemingly the glue that keeps the family together until she, y’know, gets herself knocked up. Benjy, himself, is dysfunctional due to the fact that he is a mentally challenged thirty three year old man; although the reader is not completely sure as to what disease Benjy has, it is clear that there is something deterring him from being as mentally capable as the rest of the characters in this warped story. As my teacher bluntly puts it, he has the mental capacity of a three year old--which, and when you really give it some hardcore thought process, makes him the perfect narrator. Benjy is emotionally unaffected by the world around him, meaning that he has no real reason to lie to the reader. He tells the story in complete and utter honesty, not leaving out a single detail. My personal frustration while reading the chapter, however, was the fact that it had no regard for chronology.

Once I started the chapter, I was honestly perplexed. I kept trying to figure out why Billy would just completely ignore time sequence in general. I mean, I’ve read books that had flashbacks before (who hasn’t?), but they’ve always had a break in between the present and the past. Faulkner? Yeah, he doesn’t care. At all. He will seriously jump from the present to the past in the middle of a thought, without warning. However, it really plunges the reader into exactly what Benjy’s thought process is, especially when it comes to his siblings and how they affect his lifestyle in general. He’s not bound by time, whereas the rest of his family is. Scratch that, whereas the rest of “functional” humanity is. He is able to use his memories to explain his story at a better pace, he doesn’t need to be all “throwback to when Caddy got her dress all muddy in the river”, but he can still manage to get the point across, and although it takes a little bit of extra effort, the reader is able to follow along with him.

Scooting out of the general character and layout of Benjy’s perspective (although that’s uber interesting, and I’ve had to read a few articles to even begin to grasp it), I don’t really like Benjy. It’s not because he’s mentally challenged, either.

Well, okay, it sort of is.

I’ll explain.

I don’t like this section because Benjy does exactly what Faulks needed him to. He makes me uncomfortable because even with his perspective scribbled on paper before me, I still couldn’t possibly comprehend what it would be like to be in his situation. It’s no Bridget Jones’ Diary, and while I’m well aware of the fact that it’s not supposed to be, I still can’t help but find myself getting frustrated at Benjy, and being more frustrated at the other characters in the novel that are just as uncomfortable with it as I am. While reading it, I find myself in a completely moral dilemma of wanting to just skip to the next segment of the novel just to get away from the amount of infuriating selfishness displayed by the other characters. The first entry I wrote had a lot to do with this, but it was mainly just me complaining, and not really going into depth on the actual story. Funnily enough, I was sure that readers everywhere would think that I’m a terrible person for getting annoyed and/or uncomfortable with Benjy’s behavior. But let’s cut to the chase.

I knew that I couldn’t write about Benjy in this section, because even though it’s told from his perspective, there’s no way I can really determine exactly how he affects the story as a whole--but what I can fish from it, is what his brothers and sister are really like. Personally? I believe The Sound and The Fury is all about Caddy Compson.

I’ve flipped through the book a few different times, and something that continues to gnaw at me is the fact that the only Compson kid we never get to hear from is the one that seems to stir up the most trouble. I know that I’m skipping ahead here, but everyone seems to be constantly thinking about Caddy; they think about Caddy’s innocence, her sexuality, her decision making, etc, but her actual perspective is never developed.

Excuse me while I switch gears here. I’m not sure if you’ve seen 10 Clover Field Lane yet (and if you haven’t--GO SEE IT. The acting is absolutely phenomenal!!), but there’s this montage of three characters trying to put this puzzle of a cat underwater together while they’re trapped inside a bunker. By the end of the montage, one of the characters realizes there aren’t enough pieces left to actually finish the puzzle they had been working on for so long. The character laments along the lines of “Aw, shoot. How’s that kitty gonna be able to see underwater without its eye?”. The moment is iconic and funny, and acts as a foreshadowing tool for the rest of the movie, but let’s apply it to Faulkner and get back on track here. Caddy is exactly like that puzzle--Quentin, Benjy, Jason and Dilsey all give us pieces of it, but we’re still missing her eye. We’re still missing exactly what she sees.

I’m not going to lie, I had to get this next part from Sparknotes for extra analysis: but the crafty writers from that website made a pretty great discovery that really should’ve been obvious to me from the beginning: Caddy and Benjy are the only characters in the entire novel who are really comfortable being themselves. This is why Caddy and Benjy get along; he’s not confined by rules and norms, and that sort of freedom is what she most longs for. Of course, she decides to get her freedom through promiscuity which eventually leads to premarital pregnancy. By the way, I’m not sure if you know this, but that’s a pretty big no-no, especially in this time period. Especially in the South. Especially from the daughter of an aristocratic family who’ve somehow managed to keep their name since the Civil War. Benjy, however, has no idea about how Caddy is setting out to claim her freedom.

In Benjy’s present, Caddy is leaving him and the rest of the family, by getting married and moving away. She’s clearly a smart woman, and she knows that’s the only way to truly get her freedom. But for Benjy, he’s truly upset that his only real friend and the only real person that ever really understood him was going to leave forever.

He foreshadows her leaving multiple times--my personal favorite is when she stains her dress in the river as a child, and threatens to run away if her mother got mad when she found out. Staining her dress? Staining her reputation? Seems a little too similar to be coincidental, don’t ya think? Anyway, Benjy really doesn’t like the idea of Caddy going away, and fears that if she leaves, she won’t smell like trees anymore, or that she’ll lose her innocence. That if she moves away, he’ll truly lose her forever. Honestly, this puts Benjy at a bit of a loss, and really starts to get the novel rolling.

After this section, the reader has a clear view of Caddy. A view that’s only going to be confused by Quentin. Is Quentin really in love with his sister? Or is he gay? Or does he just have a stick up his butt? Find out in my next post!

Hopefully this one will load.

What the Faulkner?

William Faulkner is known as one of the greatest American authors--that's a fact that's pretty much undisputed, especially among teenagers like myself, who really just want to get an A in their AP Literature class, so  they don't argue when a teacher labels an author as "great". Having not actually started The Sound and the Fury yet, I'm really only basing my opinions on Billy Faulks on different articles I've read in the past ten minutes. There's one question that continues to pop up in my head, though--why would ANYONE read Faulkner if they don't understand a single sentence that he writes?

Well, people probably want to feel smart and get A's--William Faulkner seemed to always have a Tom Sawyer-ish knack for getting what he wanted through clever manipulation of the human mind. At a very young age, Faulkner would tell stories to other children, but would purposefully not tell them the ending until they did his chores for him. In a similar sense, the superiority a person feels after having read a Faulkner novel seems to have an amazing appeal. In this case, I could read the first chapter of The Sound and the Fury and proudly declare to my fellow classmates that "I only had to read the chapter three times in a row!" whereas it may have taken someone else five, or even, two re-reads of the first paragraph, before giving up and typing up "Sparknotes.com" into Google. 

However, aside from the superiority complex that one gets after having read a Faulkner novel, they also get a plethora of insights from the insane amount intelligence which Billy had. Having been raised in the South by an aristocratic family, Faulkner had a greater understanding of the complications of the Post-Civil War South. Through his writing, he is able to display, in ironic and cold variations, the most despicable facets of humanity. The Sound and the Fury is known as one of his greatest novels--and I honestly look forward to reading it, even if it takes up my entire spring break. Let's rock and roll.