Sound and the Fury Wrap Up

It seems that Faulkner has presented the Compson’s story starting with a nearly incoherent telling and then subsequent tellings that are clearer in order to show the actual insignificance of this detail to the main theme and message of the story. I believe this because in terms of pure storytelling, Benjy’s chapter is certainly not essential to this book. It seems that the purpose of Benjy’s chapter is that in the end, the only thing that really matters is the individual human experience. In accordance with this, the style employed in this book of using many different narrators to tell the same story emphasizes the importance on perspective. All while telling a story about an unraveling southern family, Faulkner shows us how perspective can completely change the concept of importance. Because everyone has a different concept of importance, it seems to hint that the only thing that really matters and is really important is living your life how you want to. This also seems to be the reason that the only people who seem to end up free from the Compson family misery are the people who make “alternative” life choices, meaning Caddy and at the end Miss Quentin. This statement also seems to be supported by the fact that the one who is living out society’s idea of how a youth’s life should go, Quentin, who is in college, ends up denouncing this traditional way of life and actually killing himself.

The reason the chapters get clearer as they go also seems also to support this idea that nothing in life is really important except living how you want to live. Although Benjy may not really be able to discern how he wants to live life because of his mental state, he is certainly the character least bound and burdened by the standards of society. To support that this is a good thing, Faulkner put his narrative at the begging, and made it the only somewhat happy narrative. I say this not because it is actually very uplifting or heartwarming, but because the horrid and sad events of the rest of the book make it look like a Disney movie among a theater showing the works of Quentin Tarantino.

The statement that this book is about living life how you want is also supported by the rest of the chapters, in that as characters are more and more bound by what society expects from them, they are increasingly miserable. In the case of Quentin, the traditional education path led him to suicide. The traditional longing for a “good” job (which he blames Caddy for losing) along with his perpetuation of southern hate stereotypes leads Jason to become unhappy, bitter, and mean. This is also somewhat evidenced by Caddy and Miss Quentin, in that they leave the Compson household in order to free themselves from the burden and actually be happy (I say this knowing that Caddy was actually banished from the Compson household, because the point is that the decisions she made led to her leaving the house). In general, it indeed seems that Faulkner’s tale signifies an encouragement of those who want to free themselves from traditional, and embrace themselves for who they are and what they value. This seems to be why Faulkner provides so many different examples of what people value as important, in order to show that nothing is truly important to everyone, things are only important if we make them that way.