Themes of Sounds and Fury

The Corruption Of Southern Aristocratic Values

The first half of the nineteenth century saw the rise of a number of prominent Southern families such as
the Compsons. These aristocratic families espoused traditional Southern values. Men were expected to
act like gentlemen, displaying courage, moral strength, perseverance, and chivalry in defense of the
honor of their family name. Women were expected to be models of feminine purity, grace, and virginity
until it came time for them to provide children to inherit the family legacy. Faith in God and profound
concern for preserving the family reputation provided the grounding for these beliefs. The Civil War and
Reconstruction devastated many of these once-great Southern families economically, socially, and
psychologically. Faulkner contends that in the process, the Compsons, and other similar Southern
families, lost touch with the reality of the world around them and became lost in a haze of self-
absorption. This self-absorption corrupted the core values these families once held dear and left the
newer generations completely unequipped to deal with the realities of the modern world.

We see this corruption running rampant in the Compson family. Mr. Compson has a vague notion of
family honor—something he passes on to Quentin—but is mired in his alcoholism and maintains a
fatalistic belief that he cannot control the events that befall his family. Mrs. Compson is just as self-
absorbed, wallowing in hypochondria and self-pity and remaining emotionally distant from her children.
Quentin’s obsession with old Southern morality renders him paralyzed and unable to move past his
family’s sins. Caddy tramples on the Southern notion of feminine purity and indulges in promiscuity, as
does her daughter. Jason wastes his cleverness on self-pity and greed, striving constantly for personal
gain but with no higher aspirations. Benjy commits no real sins, but the Compsons’ decline is physically
manifested through his intellectual disability and his inability to differentiate between morality and
immorality.

The Compsons’ corruption of Southern values results in a household that is completely devoid of love,
the force that once held the family together. Both parents are distant and ineffective. Caddy, the only
child who shows an ability to love, is eventually disowned. Though Quentin loves Caddy, his love is
neurotic, obsessive, and overprotective. None of the men experience any true romantic love, and are
thus unable to marry and carry on the family name. At the conclusion of the novel, Dilsey is the only
loving member of the household, the only character who maintains her values without the corrupting
influence of self-absorption. She thus comes to represent a hope for the renewal of traditional Southern
values in an uncorrupted and positive form. The novel ends with Dilsey as the torchbearer for these
values, and, as such, the only hope for the preservation of the Compson legacy. Faulkner implies that
the problem is not necessarily the values of the old South, but the fact that these values were corrupted
by families such as the Compsons and must be recaptured for any Southern greatness to return.

Resurrection And Renewal

Three of the novel’s four sections take place on or around Easter, 1928. Faulkner’s placement of the
novel’s climax on this weekend is significant, as the weekend is associated with Christ’s crucifixion on
Good Friday and resurrection on Easter Sunday. A number of symbolic events in the novel could be
likened to the death of Christ: Quentin’s death, Mr. Compson’s death, Caddy’s loss of virginity, or the
decline of the Compson family in general. Some critics have characterized Benjy as a Christ figure, as
Benjy was born on Holy Saturday and is currently thirty-three, the same age as Christ at the crucifixion.
Interpreting Benjy as a Christ figure has a variety of possible implications. Benjy may represent the
impotence of Christ in the modern world and the need for a new Christ figure to emerge. Alternatively,
Faulkner may be implying that the modern world has failed to recognize Christ in its own midst.

Though the Easter weekend is associated with death, it also brings the hope of renewal and
resurrection. Though the Compson family has fallen, Dilsey represents a source of hope. Dilsey is herself
somewhat of a Christ figure. A literal parallel to the suffering servant of the Bible, Dilsey has endured
Christlike hardship throughout her long life of service to the disintegrating Compson family. She has
constantly tolerated Mrs. Compson’s self-pity, Jason’s cruelty, and Benjy’s frustrating incapacity. While
the Compsons crumble around her, Dilsey emerges as the only character who has successfully
resurrected the values that the Compsons have long abandoned—hard work, endurance, love of family,
and religious faith.

Time
Time is omnipresent in The Sound and the Fury, but it is confusing—not just for the characters but for
readers as well. Benjy’s narrative slips and slides from past to present to past with no warning. For him,
time has no meaning, so readers must struggle to follow the wanderings of his mind, to make meaning
from what at first seem scrambled thoughts. William Faulkner intends to point out what tortures
Macbeth: individual experiences, thoughts, and opinions are inconsequential and meaningless in the
endless march of time.

Quentin also struggles with time. The past dominates his life, breaking into his present in the form of
tortured flashbacks about his youth. Of the Compson brothers, Quentin is arguably the one most
haunted by the decay of the Compson family. He is obsessed with, and yet confused by, the Old South’s
code of honor, stipulating that men should act like gentlemen and women uphold standards of purity,
but he can no longer apply this code to his own family. His sister Caddy’s development into a sexual
woman challenges his code. As a result, Quentin wants to stop time, to freeze himself and his family in
time to avoid further dishonor. However, progress into the future is inevitable. Quentin kills himself
because he cannot move into the future.

Jason’s struggle, on the other hand, is in part a race against time. It is also a rebellion against his place in
time as the youngest and least favored son—the one for whom no land was sacrificed, for whom no
money was reserved. He wants more money, more control, more recognition, and he wants it now
because his parents did not grant any to him. His sadism demands constant feeding, and he cannot wait
until all the burdens on him are removed so he and his money are the only things left. With the money,
then, he can control the future.

In contrast, Dilsey understands and embraces the flow of time, rather than struggling to define herself
against it. The Compson clock might be broken, chiming the wrong time every hour, but she still knows
what time it is. She sees the beginning and the end of all time and is satisfied to live in the moment.

Decay of Family
The Compson household is in a state of decay, rapidly disintegrating in every sense. However, it is not
just the Compson family that is rotting away. In exploring the decay of this particular family, once part of
a proud aristocracy, Faulkner is also commenting on the gradual disintegration of the Old South that is
so evident at the time he pens the novel.

Mired in self-absorption and unhealthy dependencies, the Compsons, like many others in the
reconstructed South, cannot change. Because they cannot move forward, they are doomed to slowly
decay, disintegrate, and disappear. Their world becomes smaller and smaller as they sell off their land,
their buildings fall to shambles, and the next generation escapes. With the exception of Quentin’s
section of the novel, the other three take place in 1928, on the verge of the Great Depression, when
many Americans lost everything they had. The Compsons and other families like them will soon be
“heard no more,” as Macbeth says.

The novel’s stream-of-consciousness style often mirrors this disintegration. Boundaries break down
between past and present, which often become hard to tell apart, as if time itself is disintegrating. As
they try to fit the pieces of the story together, readers are also fighting to hold a meaningful narrative
together, as it appears to come apart at the seams.

Language
Faulkner’s innovative use of language, especially the stream-of-consciousness technique, goes hand in
hand with the pervasive theme of time. With four different narrators relating many of the same events
from such different perspectives, the truth seems elusive. But, that is the point: language cannot be
trusted to reveal any absolute truths. Like time, language is ultimately meaningless, “signifying nothing,”
as Macbeth puts it. Nevertheless, people hold on to language dearly. In the novel, Benjy loves the word
caddie because it is a pun on the name of his lost sister; Quentin repeats the word sister often; and
Jason’s favorite word is, of course, money. Readers, too, try to use language as clues to reconstruct the
reality of the Compsons’ situation based on the fragmented language and experience of each of its
narrators, because language provides important clues to help readers navigate among the spontaneous
mental associations of the characters, particularly Benjy and Quentin. The fragmented use of language
also mirrors the struggle of the Compsons as the family decays toward disintegration and nothingness.