SOURCE: Toker, Leona. “Diffusion of Information in The Sound and the Fury.” College Literature 15, no. 2 (spring 1988): 111-35.

[In the following essay, Toker explores the effects on the reader of the difficult narrative patterns in The Sound and the Fury.]

A time to get, and a time to lose; a time
          to keep and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time
          to keep silence, and a time to speak.

—Ecclesiastes, 3:6,7

The text of The Sound and the Fury is at first difficult to follow. The diffusive presentation of material impedes the imaginative construction of the scenes: words tend to fall flat on our inner ear, failing to come alive in a dramatic illusion. And since the initial mist is at its densest in Section 1 (“told by an idiot”), it seems to be a side effect of Faulkner's experiment with the point of view. Actually, however, diffusion of information is a rhetorical device in its own right; it operates throughout the novel and exerts a strong influence on our interpretative activity.

The diffusion of information in The Sound and the Fury is the effect of numerous minor informational gaps which delay pattern recognition. Part of these gaps are called for by the narrative stance. The first three of the novel's four sections are written, as it were, “from the point of view” of Benjy, Quentin, and Jason Compson, respectively; the last section is presented by the so-called omniscient narrator. Though the three brothers are, strictly speaking, “focal characters” rather than “narrators,”¹ their sections are based on the convention of withholding from the reader the things that the focal characters cannot know or register themselves. This technique accounts for the following four kinds of realistically motivated gaps (to be distinguished from rhetorically motivated gaps that do not stem from the point of view).

(1) The ostensible cause of the difficulty in following the narrative of The Sound and the Fury for the first time is the frequency of its time-shifts. But time-shifts create confusion only because they are not accompanied by a clear chronological reference that would help us piece together scattered bits of information on the first reading. The Sound and the Fury contains only four explicit chronological reference-points—the four dates which serve as titles of the four sections. The absence of additional explicit chronological guide-lines is a consequence of focalization (or point of view). Time-shifts are supposed to imitate the spontaneous associative backward-and-forward movement of the characters' minds and therefore cannot be expected to have date tags. For Benjy, notions like “before/after” and “past/present” do not exist; and Quentin keeps his mind away from concepts related to time. One of the reasons why confusion is reduced in Section 3 is that Jason does not block time references from his consciousness.

It therefore takes a long time to classify separate flashes of scenes around such events as Damuddy's funeral, Caddy's affair with Dalton Ames, her wedding, Quentin's suicide, Benjy's castration, the arrival of Caddy's new-born daughter (the girl Quentin), the deaths of Mr. Compson and of Roskus Gibson.² The exact sequence of some minor occurrences remains unclear to the very end.

(2) Imitation of the characters' “stream of consciousness” involves a delay of expositional material. As a result, our filling in of “who's who” information is slow: the main characters, with the exception of “Father,” “Mother,” and Uncle Maury, are referred to only by their names; for a long time we are not informed about their appearance, family status, place in society, or antecedents. Allusions are made to facts with which we have not been made familiar. For instance, when Jason says to his mother, “Father and Quentin cant hurt you,”³ we cannot possibly infer that she is going to visit the graves of the father and the eldest son of the family: the only Quentin mentioned so far is the little girl playing in the yard with Luster. Nor is it possible to understand that Mrs. Compson's carriage has stopped by Jason's store. On the first reading veiled references of this kind make most of the conversations in Section 1 sound like indistinct background noise.⁴

Veiled references stem, as it were, from the focal characters' failure to conceptualize, from their short-cut thinking, or from their too profound familiarity with their environment. In Section 1, for instance, Luster's personality takes several pages to materialize from a collection of nagging remarks and mischievous actions because Benjy has no reason to think of him as a fourteen-year-old Negro or as Dilsey's grandson.⁵ In Section 3 some confusion results from the abuse of the pronoun “she” which Jason applies to all the women who encumber his existence:

I opened her letter and took the check out. Just like a woman. Six days late. […] And like as not, when they sent the bank statement out, she would like to know why I never deposited my salary until the sixth.

(236)

Even if we guess that the check is from Caddy, on the first reading we can hardly realize that the exophoric “she” of the last sentence refers to Mrs. Compson. We cannot, therefore, understand that Jason deposits Caddy's checks in his mother's account, pretending that they are the salary which he actually hoards in his room or speculates with on the cotton market. Jason does not dwell on these machinations because for him they are a matter of routine.

(3) The use of a retarded person as a focalizer of the first section motivates not only the narrative's strong reliance on sense perceptions but also the elisions of whatever is not directly perceptible. Benjy cannot use inference or memory to supply the missing elements in the flux of perception; so we have to do it for him. In the following passage, for instance, the rapidity of movement prevents Benjy from getting a clear view of what is passing:

It [the flag] was red, flapping on the pasture. Then there was a bird slanting and tilting on it. Luster threw. The flag flapped on the bright grass and the trees.

(2)

Benjy has not had time to identify the object thrown by Luster. Our reading pace slackens as we translate “Luster threw” into “Luster threw something at the bird.” We must also fill in the fact that “the bird flew away”: the repeated statement that the flag “flapped on the bright grass and the trees” implies that the bird is no longer perched on the flag—it has been frightened off by Luster. The metonymic nature of the repetition also suggests that the concepts of “cause,” “presence,” and “absence” are beyond Benjy's comprehension. So while elision is necessitated by the point of view, it is also a means of character portrayal. Moreover, it prolongs our attention to the strong image of the red flag flapping against the green pasture and prepares us for Benjy's tenaciousness respecting the few “bright shapes” in the Compson world.⁶

(4) Similar effects are produced by other cases of propositional metonymy, such as “the room came back” (53) used in lieu of “Dilsey switched on the light.” Here the local rhetorical effect of the substitution is emphasis on “going away” and “coming back” as the main reference points in Benjy's experience, a pair of notions that replaces the “presence/absence” pair. All metonymic propositions, as well as all the cases of veiled reference and elision, have specific local effects of this kind, while their cumulative effect is that of diffusing information, defamiliarizing scenes, and slowing down the pace of reading.

If all the informational gaps in The Sound and the Fury were thus necessitated by focalization, our initial confusion would appear to be a by-product of the point of view.⁷ This, however, is not the case: the text frequently elides things of which the focal characters are well aware.⁸ The resulting gaps do not reflect the characters' thought processes but perform specific rhetorical functions.

So it is in Section 1. Only from other characters' remarks—such as “He want your lightning bugs, T. P.” (43), or “Give him a flower to hold. […] That what he wanting” (10)—do we learn that Benjy wants a particular object. The narrative omits to mention the object on which his attention is riveted; instead it records the conversations (“the sound”) that is not of interest to the focal character. This selection of material conflicts with psychological accuracy, yet it emphasizes Benjy's lack of self-awareness and is, therefore, felt to be part of the code which renders the world view of an idiot.⁹ For a brief moment the “inside view” of the focalizer is discontinued and replaced by a diagnostic suggestion, without letting us register the jolt.

Section 2 excludes references to Quentin's conscious intentions. In particular, we are not explicitly informed that Quentin has decided to commit suicide at the end of the day. The same principle extends to the purposes of his seemingly humdrum activities: for a long time we cannot understand that many of them are a suicide's last tasks, especially since Section 1 has not made it clear that Quentin has killed himself. Quentin's fatigue and morbidity, the recurrence of the images related to death by water, his packing up, writing notes, mailing letters, and buying flat irons—all reveal Quentin's intention gradually. The motif of suicide grows, passing from our subliminal awareness to conscious certainty. We are thus led through a process parallel to the gradual crystallization of the thought of suicide in Quentin's own mind over the preceding year.

Another detail that the narrative omits to mention explicitly is Quentin's experiment with time, his attempt to deny time instead of renouncing life.¹⁰ This rhetorically oriented elision leads to a new set of puzzles. For instance, when we read that “Spoade had his shirt on; then it must be” (118), we wonder what the fatal “it” that “must be” is. Actually the sentence means “it must be about noon,” but we can understand this only on a repeated reading when familiarity with Quentin's attitude to time permits us to connect the aposiopesis with the remarks made about Spoade at the beginning of the section—only around noon would that gentleman appear in full attire (see 96-97). On the first reading it takes us a long time to understand that Quentin is dodging all sense perceptions that signal the hour of the day, yet we are struck by the energy with which he fragments his thoughts and impressions. This energy conflicts with the death-wish languor and suicidal impulses recurrent in Quentin's section.

The absence of reference to Quentin's intentions is an appropriate form of rendering his attitude to death and time. For Quentin, suicide is an intimate act, the privacy of which he guards even at the cost of repulsing his roommate Shreve's solicitude. It is his strongest argument against his father's quasi-Solomonic suggestion that love and grief pass like everything else.¹¹ His conflict with time is a straw at which he clutches like a drowning man whose body does not yet wish to die. Both the misguided self-sacrifice and the unwillingness to commit it are screened from the strangers' eyes. The omniscient narrator protects Quentin's privacy from us just as Quentin himself protects it from the people who crowd his world.

In Section 3 the intentions of the focalizer likewise never make their way into the text. This concerns not only Jason's habitual activities, where the withholding of information may be explained by his taking his course of action for granted, but also his specific decisions on landmark days of his life.

One of these landmarks is the day of his father's funeral. As the narrative records the subterfuges that Jason uses in order to let Caddy see her baby in secret from Mrs. Compson, we are never warned of his malicious attribution of the strictly literal meaning to the word “see.” Only when shown how he lets Caddy catch a glimpse of Quentin and run after the carriage that is taking the baby away, do we realize what Jason has been planning all along. We find ourselves unprepared for Jason's cheating Quentin out of her mother's money order, or for his burning the passes to the show instead of giving them to Luster. Section 3 gives us a series of such surprises: we know that Jason is an unprepossessing person, yet we repeatedly find out, as Caddy does in her turn, that we have been underestimating his meanness. Surprise, indeed, is Jason's own favorite tactics in personal relationships: “Always keep them guessing. If you cant think of any other way to surprise them, give them a bust in the jaw” (240). Thus while the first-person narration yields insights into the focal character's mentality, rhetorically oriented gaps suggest what it would be like to have to deal with him. They supplement the imitation of his mental processes with a distancing external view.

Whatever the local effects of rhetorically oriented gaps, cumulatively they contribute to our confusion on the first reading of the novel. Hence confusion is a deliberate rhetorical device rather than a mere corollary of the point of view.¹²

How, then, does this device affect our quest for meaning in The Sound and the Fury? How does it influence our different courses on the first and repeated readings of the novel?

On the first reading of The Sound and the Fury the initial confusion provides a contrast for a few clear scenes thus bringing them into high relief.

These are the scenes that present Benjy's relationship with his sister Caddy. They stand out against the unlocated images and incomprehensible utterances of the rest of the section because they describe self-explanatory action: Caddy understands her little brother's wishes and “translates” his conduct for us. For instance, we do not know why Benjy insists on going out to the cold gate until Caddy fills in the gap: “Hello, Benjy. […] Did you come to meet me?” (5). When Caddy is absent we seldom know why other characters have to hush Benjy, but when she is present, the cause of his tears is usually revealed by her removing the cause. In most cases it has to do with the thought of her going or having gone away:

“I'll run away and never come back,” Caddy said. I began to cry. Caddy turned around and said “Hush.” So I hushed. Then they played in the branch. […] Caddy was all wet and muddy behind, and I started to cry and she came and squatted in the water.

“Hush now,” she said. “I'm not going to run away.” So I hushed. Caddy smelled like trees in the rain.

(21-22)

Because of our clear understanding of this one relationship set against a background of unassimilated information, our response to Section 1 is parallel to Benjy's own experience. For Benjy the world is divided into a foreground and a background; in the foreground are Caddy (later the old slipper, her vestige) and the smooth bright shapes that he enjoys watching—in the fire, in the mirror, in the jewel box, from a rolling carriage, or else in his dreams. As he holds Caddy's slipper during a meal, he recollects the days when she fed him and he remains undisturbed by the conflict between Caddy's daughter and Jason. This indifference is reenacted by the reader: we do not feel sorry for young Quentin on the first reading of Section 1 because we do not know who she is and only remember that she has been unkind to Benjy; moreover, the scene is so chopped up that its dramatic tension is lost even on a repeated reading. The violent confrontation seems to be taking place in the background while the foreground is occupied by the gradual improvement of Benjy's state of mind.

The lucid parts of Section 1 carry the major theme of the novel—the frustration of a fundamental human need, the need of love.¹³ Very early in the novel, in what we identify as Benjy's memories of his childhood, it is made clear that the egocentric Mrs. Compson does not satisfy her children's need for affection. Even her distress on account of Benjy takes a perfunctory form that does not deceive the sensitive though uncomprehending child:

“Come here and kiss Mother, Benjamin.”

Caddy took me to Mother's chair and Mother took my face in her hands and then she held me against her.

“My poor baby,” she said. She let me go. “You and Versh take good care of him, honey.”

(8)

Significantly, Mrs. Compson delegates her responsibility for Benjy to Caddy, and as it soon becomes clear Caddy fills the void that her coldness leaves in Benjy's life. It is on Caddy, a substitute mother, that his well-being depends: “You're not a poor baby. Are you. You've got your Caddy. Haven't you got your Caddy?” (8). Such a distribution of roles explains Benjy's misery in the fictional present: Caddy has gone away.

At this point we begin to wonder why Caddy has left home and whether her absence is permanent. We even hope, as we might do in more conventional novels, that she will eventually return. The abruptness with which her absence is suddenly explained parallels the brutality of the blow that it inflicts on Benjy:

You cant do no good looking through the gate, T. P. said. Miss Caddy done gone long ways away. Done got married and left you. You cant do no good, holding to the gate and crying. She cant hear you.

What is it he wants, T. P. Mother said. Cant you play with him and keep him quiet.

He want to go down yonder and look through the gate, T. P. said.

Well, he cannot do it, Mother said. It's raining. You will just have to play with him and keep him quiet. You, Benjamin.

Ain't nothing going to quiet him, T. P. said. He think if he down to the gate, Miss Caddy come back.

Nonsense, Mother said.

(62-63)

The callousness of the conversation casts a shadow on Caddy's image, even though a girl's getting married is not an unnatural development. We wonder whether she left Benjy with the same coldheartedness which rings in Mrs. Compson's reference to her absence. Caddy can now remain “beautiful and moving” only if she is shown to be contrite and unhappy. This demand, strangely different from the conventional concern for a heroine's happiness, is, to some extent, satisfied in the scene where Caddy is crying in Benjy's lap:

I could hear the clock, and I could hear Caddy standing behind me, and I could hear the roof. It's still raining, Caddy said. I hate rain. I hate everything. And then her head came into my lap and she was crying, holding me, and I began to cry. Then I looked at the fire again and the bright smooth shapes went on again. I could hear the clock and the roof and Caddy.

(69)

Caddy obviously has no one to turn to except the partly responsive Benjy. She is now the one whose need for love and understanding is frustrated. The intimation of adolescent despair (“I hate rain. I hate everything”) is later modified by Quentin's complaint about entrapment: “I wish it wouldn't rain. […] You cant do anything” (81). Caddy, the narrative suggests, is trapped.

We do not know the nature of her trouble, and (like Benjy) only fear that she will, after all, abandon him. Our uneasiness about her is revived in the scene that pertains to her loss of virginity:

Her hand was against her mouth and I saw her eyes and I cried. We went up the stairs. She stopped again, against the wall, looking at me and she cried and she went on and I came on, crying, and she shrank against the wall, looking at me. She opened the door to her room, but I pulled at her dress and we went to the bathroom and she stood against the door, looking at me. Then she put her arm against her face and I pushed at her, crying.

(84-85)

What troubles us in this scene is not Caddy's sexual misconduct so much as her unusual reluctance to do something that would soothe her brother. Taking advantage of focalization, the novelist makes it difficult for us to understand that Benjy is pushing Caddy to the bathroom, as if to make her wash and regain her smell of trees. Therefore, on the first reading we do not know that Caddy's lack of responsiveness stems from her sense of futility: water can no longer help.¹⁴

Since the beauty of her image depends on her ability to love, we expect the narrative not merely to provide us with details of Caddy's marriage but also to allow us to justify her defection, or at least to reconcile it with the sympathy that her image has evoked on the opening pages of the novel. Benjy's section does not meet this expectation. The tranquilizing effect of its ending is produced by a sequence of pleasant memories that come to Benjy after supper and while falling asleep. Here Caddy is again the tender little girl who smells of trees. The past and the present mingle in the darkness that begins “to go in smooth, bright shapes, like it always does, even when Caddy says that I have been asleep” (92). Yet these bright shapes are a tenuous oneiric comfort. We still wonder about Caddy's betrayal as we proceed to Section 2.

Though references to objects and people mentioned in Section 1 are by now more or less intelligible, Quentin's section presents us with new difficulties. There is not even a pretence of showing us the way through the focalizer's mind. Fragments belonging to different events are massed together; italics mark off not time layers but themes and motifs; and syntax appears to have a new set of rules. Eventually, Quentin's section becomes easier to follow because narrative stretches belonging to the same time layer are longer than in Section 1.

Absence of reference to Quentin's intentions often impedes our understanding of his experience in the fictional present. Other gaps make us lose track of his movements: when the narrative shifts to his thoughts and then returns to the account of the outer scene, some part of the story time elapses unrecorded and our hold on the fictional present becomes as uncertain as Quentin's grasp on reality. Therefore, the confusing account of Quentin's thoughts comes into contrast not with the fictional present but with two relatively clear flashbacks: his memories of Caddy's marriage, and of her affair with Dalton Ames.

These two episodes gain prominence for a number of reasons: their length favors sustained attention; they are typographically distinct (scenes that pertain to the latter event have no punctuation at all, whereas those pertaining to the former are printed in italics); the sequence of their parts is not distorted; and the context makes it clear “who says what.” Moreover, the information contained in these episodes is precisely what we have been expecting since the middle of Section 1: it sheds light on the events that drove Caddy away from home.¹⁵

Thus as in Benjy's section, the alternation of clarity and confusion enhances the impact of the episodes that involve Caddy and develop the theme of the need for love. Quentin's affections, like Benjy's, are entirely concentrated on his sister: he is conscious of Mrs. Compson's failure as a mother (“if I'd just had a mother so I could say Mother Mother,” 213) and disgusted by her petit bourgeois pretensions, her Griselda pose, and her part in arranging Caddy's marriage. He expects Caddy rather than his mother to embody the dynastic purity and pride. Yet this task, like the role of Benjy's substitute mother, is too restrictive for Caddy. The two painful flashbacks present Quentin's and Caddy's inability to perform the parts that each assigns to the other. Quentin fails in the strength, courage, and confidence that fascinate Caddy in Dalton Ames; Caddy, on the other hand, cannot renounce the whole world for his sake, as he would have her do in his vision of platonic incest beyond the flames of a disinfected hell (144).

Unable to control Caddy, Quentin wishes to hurt her—just as the reader wishes to see her suffer lest the beauty of her image be marred by a suggestion of callous egotism. This expectation, aroused in Section 1, is largely satisfied in Section 2. In Quentin's flashbacks we see Caddy trapped, frightened by her own initiation, “sick” (early stage of pregnancy combined with existential nausea), tormented by anxiety about Benjy and by guilt for having stimulated her father's alcoholism:

I'm just sick I can't ask anybody yet promise you will

(138)

There was something terrible in me sometimes at night I could see it grinning at me I could see it through them grinning at me through their faces it's gone now and I'm sick

(138)

it'll be all right it won't matter don't let them send him to Jackson promise

(139)

I've got to marry somebody

(143)

can you think of Benjy and Father and do it not of me

(153)

Father will be dead in a year they say if he doesn't stop drinking and he won't stop he can't stop since I since last summer and then they'll send Benjy to Jackson I can't cry I can't even cry

(154)

The end of Section 2 thus creates a faint sense of completion. Caddy's suffering cancels the suggestion of cold betrayal; its pathos restores the appeal of her image and makes the frantic young woman as “moving” as the headstrong little girl of the novel's early pages. The second half of The Sound and the Fury is, therefore, somewhat anticlimactic: it never reaches the pathetic pitch of the first two sections.

Confusion is not intense in Section 3, yet some parts of this section are more difficult to understand than others. In keeping with the demands of focalization, all the references to Jason's salary, Caddy's money, blank checks, investments, and cotton market gambling remain unintelligible for a long time. By contrast, the episodes involving Caddy's daughter Quentin (whom we finally identify as such) stand out much more clearly against this background. Their action is self-explanatory; their obscure references are few. Thus the foiling effect of the confusion of Sections 1 and 2 is reproduced, in a fainter form, in Section 3.

In the more comprehensible parts of Jason's section, it is now young Quentin's turn to be the bearer of the novel's major theme. Like Benjy, Quentin is denied her mother's love. Though vulgar and ill-tempered, she becomes pathetic when she cries, “Dilsey, I want my mother” (230). Her subsequent rudeness to kind-hearted Dilsey is symptomatic: the exhausted old housekeeper is a poor substitute for Caddy.¹⁶ Unlike Benjy, young Quentin has never enjoyed the tenderness of even a substitute mother. Now our former uneasiness about Caddy is revived: we wonder how she could have left her child in the household that has grown still gloomier than in her own day. Though it is aesthetically appropriate that this girl, born in the year of Quentin's suicide, is replacing both her mother and her uncle in the Compson house, we are troubled by the suspicion that Caddy has not escaped the contagion of Mrs. Compson's callousness. This suspicion is eventually allayed by Jason's memories of Caddy's desperate attempts to see little Quentin.

Thus our response undergoes a development analogous to that of the first half of the novel, only here it is compressed into one half of a section. As in Section 1, a shadow is cast over Caddy's image, and then, as in Section 2, the shadow is removed when Caddy appears to be miserable, trapped, and defying a new set of bans.¹⁷

Caddy still embodies the capacity for love which has not completely vanished from the novel's world though thwarted by the jealousy of the Compson brothers, the weakness of the father, and the egocentric affectations of the mother. In Section 3 these qualities—with the addition of sadism—combine in Jason Compson. Jason has been harshly condemned by the early waves of critical response to The Sound and the Fury: indeed, on the first reading he seems to be an unmitigated villain, a Snopes among the Compsons, a traitor to the values of the aristocratic South. This, however, is an oversimplified view stemming from the absolutization of the response elicited by Section 3 on the first reading.

This response is largely caused by a touch of resentful impatience. The narrative of Section 3 is tantalizing: its comparative clarity promises further elucidation of Caddy's fate, yet, much as we would like to see Caddy again, she appears only in the scarcely recognizable shape of Jason's subdued antagonist. Jason's cherished memories are not of Caddy's personality or fate, but of the revenge that he took on her for unintentionally depriving him of a job in a bank. By the middle of Section 3 Caddy's image recedes from the narrative as the account of Jason's affairs becomes progressively more intelligible. Jason's meanness and self-defeating impulses gradually capture our reluctant attention, and we let Caddy's story fade out, leaving the foreplane for precisely that part of the fictional world which was formerly perceived as the hazy background of Benjy's section.

In Section 4 the alternation of confusion and clarity is further compressed into a still shorter stretch of the narrative—the account of Parson Shegog's Easter sermon. The bulk of the section is not confusing, even though the absence of explanatory comments and the selectiveness of the camera eye often delay our understanding of the characters' movements. The only really incoherent part of the discourse is Parson Shegog's Application, during which he slips into the Negro accents and starts bombarding the congregation with incomplete, disconnected, allusive, emotionally charged phrases:

When de long, cold—Oh, I tells you, breddren, when de long, cold—I sees de light en I sees de word, po sinner! Dey passed away in Egypt, de swingin chariots; de generations passed away. Wus a rich man: whar he now, O breddren? Wus a po man: whar he now, O sistuhn? Oh I tells you, ef you aint got de milk en de dew of de old salvation when de long, cold years rolls away!

(368-69)

This poetic confusion serves as a foil for an unexpectedly clear image that the preacher creates at the end of the sermon. He presents the Passion in terms of the thwarted feelings of Mary, who emerges, in an apocryphal scene, as an ordinary loving “mammy” helpless in the face of a hostile power:

Bredden! Look at dem little chillen settin dar. Jesus was like dat once. He mammy suffered de glory en de pangs. Sometime maybe she helt him at de nightfall, whilst de angels singin him to sleep; maybe she look out de do' en see de Roman po-lice passin. […] Listen, breddren! I sees de day. Ma'y settin in de do' wid Jesus on her lap, de little Jesus. I hears de angels singin de peaceful songs en de glory; I sees de closin eyes; sees Mary jump up, sees de sojer face: We gwine to kill! We gwine to kill! We gwine to kill you little Jesus! I hears de weepin en de lamentation of de po mammy widout de salvation en de word of God!

(369)

The emphasis given to the clear and pathetic image by surrounding it with a farrago of confused motifs makes the sermon a compact model of the novel's central rhetorical effect. As in the preceding sections, the image brought into relief by the contrast of confusion and clarity embodies the theme of love, yet Caddy and her kin are no longer the exponents of this theme. Their function is transferred to the Eternal Motherly. By comparing Jesus to the children in the church choir, the preacher emphasizes the universal human significance of Mary's image and underplays its supernatural connotations.

A miniature model of the novel's rhetoric, the sermon evokes in Dilsey a response analogous to our own experience on the first reading of The Sound and the Fury: it directs her attention to the essence rather than to the details of the Compson tragedy.

When young Quentin's room is found empty in the morning and Jason telephones the police, Dilsey seems curiously unconcerned about the girl's whereabouts. Her energies are directed towards preserving a semblance of peace in the house, and, having done her utmost to calm Mrs. Compson, she sets out for church, as planned, as if nothing were wrong. The seeming callousness of her conduct is the result of efforts to persevere despite nervous exhaustion (“I done stood all I kin,” 357). Staving off a breakdown in order to cope with her duties, she subconsciously defers her understanding of the new catastrophe.

Parson Shegog's sermon releases Dilsey's grip on the immediate situation. She stops hushing Benjy, and cries unashamedly, ignoring the people around her. The sermon sanctions the luxury of emotional release and allows her to attain an overview (“I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin,” p. 371) of the fall of a family that could not endure in the face of social change because its root were cut by lovelessness. Dilsey's experience interprets Parson Shegog's “old salvation” (369) as love rather than as religious belief.

The cathartic weeping aroused by pity for the unloved and for those whose love is subjected to torture renews Dilsey's power of endurance; she can again “lif up [her] tree en walk” (370). The use of the word “tree” rather than “cross” plays a double role: in addition to forming an important recurrence (cf. the tree that Caddy climbs in Section 1), it activizes the connotation of endurance rather than that of martyrdom.

Dilsey's repeated cryptic remark “I seed de first en de last” (375) puts an end to our expectations that Section 4, which is directly presented by the omniscient narrator, will give us concrete information about the fate of the main characters. Despite the open ending, the story is completed: like Dilsey, we have “seen the last.” The lives of the Compson children have been wasted, no matter what shapes their fate may now take. Society is moving forward, the slaves, according to Parson Shegog's allusion, have come out of Egypt, and the “swinging chariots,” the generations of the Southern upper classes, cannot rally as long as among them love is withheld, banished, crushed. The recurrent Faulknerian themes of inner conflicts, of social mobility, and of psychic inertia gain prominence on repeated readings; on the first reading, however, it is the theme of the frustrated need for love, the differentia specifica of The Sound and the Fury, that is brought into high relief by the interplay of clarity and confusion.

The Sound and the Fury clamors for a repeated reading, and not only because all great books must be re-read. Its last section, which purports to be the clearest, fails to elucidate a great number of moot points. At the same time, since many of our early questions, e.g., “Who is the female Quentin?” or “Why does Caddy not return home?”, have been answered and since we now possess the facts to which the veiled references and allusions of the first two sections pertain, we feel that a second reading will yield a clearer understanding of the story. The portrait sketches of Dilsey, Benjy, and Jason, provided in Section 4, likewise contribute to our wish to return to the novel's early scenes and reconstruct them with a new precision in visual detail. The transition to a repeated reading is facilitated by the open ending, by the absence of a formal introduction or exposition in Section 1, and by the fact that the fictional present of Section 1 refers to the day immediately preceding the one described in Section 4—in effect, Section 1 reads as if it were Section 5.

A repeated reading, however, both frustrates and exceeds our expectations. We find out that a full explication, an unambiguous imaginative construction of the characters' actions and thoughts, can never be achieved. To give but one example, we do not know what passes in Quentin's mind when Shreve urges him to hurry to chapel:

He looked at his watch. “Bell in two minutes.”

“I didn't know it was that late.” He was still looking at his watch, his mouth shaping. “I'll have to hustle. I cant stand another cut. The dean told me last week—” He put his watch back into his pocket. Then I quit talking.

(95)

Quentin's reply may be one of the last sallies of his smouldering vitality—he “quits talking” when he remembers that he is going to die that night, so he need not worry about the dean. Or else it may be a sham: he starts talking in order to prevent Shreve from naming the exact hour and stops as soon as Shreve gives up this intention. If we resolve the ambiguity by saying that Quentin's wish to ignore time is a remnant of his vitality, we pass from explicating to interpretating the text.

Section 1 never makes it clear how much Benjy's intuitive understanding exceeds or falls short of the material presented in his section. In Section 2 the status of the narrative blocks remains vague to the end—we cannot establish, for instance, whether Quentin recollects the end of the Dalton Ames affair while or after he is beaten by Gerald Bland, whether he actually relives the past or has it flash through his mind in an instant, whether the textual space devoted to his memories is supposed to approximate the duration of the Bland picnic. Section 3 never explains Jason's feelings: his cruelty to young Quentin may be an expression of sadistic vengefulness or of incestuous attraction; his “feeling funny,” i.e. crying, after his father's funeral may be caused by genuine grief or by a childish resentment at being left alone in the rain. Section 4 gives us no specific insights into Dilsey's or Luster's mind.

Thus the inner worlds of the characters resist penetration. After any number of readings, The Sound and the Fury still gives the impression of overhearing people who have been close to one another and need not explain the things to which they refer. In time, we begin to grasp the meaning of their allusions, yet, not having shared their common experience, we remain excluded from their mutual understanding.

Our sense of exclusion is parallel to the experience of the characters who live in a world where the potential for love is not realized. It is one of the motifs symbolically expressed by Caddy's climbing the tree to look in through the parlour window when the children are excluded from mourning (though their mental health requires participation in the ritual of grief). The reader's re-enactment of the characters' sense of exclusion replaces the element of “vicarious experience” which is now sabotaged by essentially the same techniques that account for the confusion on the first reading.

Indeed, whereas in personal relationships a deeper understanding usually promotes sympathy, this does not always happen in the reading of fiction. In The Sound and the Fury the opposite is true: the more subtle and precise our imaginative reconstruction of the characters' predicament, the greater our detachment from them, the stronger the “anaesthetic” element of the aesthetic distance.

Our growing familiarity with the setting and the major events and our success in piecing together disparate strands of information are sources of pleasure in themselves, largely divorced from vicarious experience. For instance, in Benjy's first drive to the cemetery with Mrs. Compson we are pleased to recognize the precedent of his habitual Sunday drives. We are delighted to be able to connect the flower that he likes to hold during such drives with the plant that Dilsey detaches from Mrs. Compson's bouquet on the first occasion. If we remember the broken narcissus that Benjy is holding during his drive in the last scene of the novel, we read the account of its precedent as a symbol in the making. The intellectual component of this experience almost completely cancels emotional response.

On the first reading our emotional response is promoted by the prominence of the episodes that emphasize the poignancy of the need for love. These episodes attract less attention on a repeated reading because our new competence neutralizes the device that made them prominent; that is, the interplay of clarity and confusion. For instance, on the first reading, Benjy's hope that Caddy will come home if he waits for her near the gate at the end of schooltime is especially moving because among the little that we have so far understood there is the scene of his meeting Caddy by the cold gate at Christmas-time. On a repeated reading the connection between the two episodes is diluted by the multitude of details presented in between. Whereas on the first reading most of these details merged into the vague background complex, now, being much more intelligible, they acquire an interest of their own and so reduce the impact of the Benjy-Caddy plot line.

On a repeated reading we are, moreover, constantly diverted from the pathos of the scenes to features of the narrative and of the reading process.¹⁸ For instance, though we may have grown accustomed to the special code used in Benjy's section and can automatically “translate” a metonymic proposition like “the bowl went away” (30) into “Versh took the bowl away,” there still remain stretches of narrative that are less easily “translated” into conventional notions. For example:

I could hear Queenie's feet and the bright shapes went smooth and steady on both sides, the shadows of them slowing across Queenie's back. They went on like the bright tops of wheels. Then those on one side stopped at the tall white post where the soldier was. But on the other side they went smooth and steady, but a little slower.

(11-12)

On the first reading it would take an extraordinary perceptiveness to understand that the carriage stops by the sidewalk: the shapes that cease moving are houses on Benjy's side of the street, and the shapes that go on moving on the other side are vehicles on the roadway. In any case, it takes a repeated reading to achieve a full imaginative reconstruction of the scene because we must know the significance of smooth bright shapes in Benjy's life in order to visualize him sitting in placid contentment during Mrs. Compson's nervous dialogue with Jason. On a repeated reading we construct both the outside scene and the way in which it is reflected in the character's consciousness. Such dramatic irony increases our detachment from the character and weakens the impulse of sympathetic identification. It is the parallel experience, rather than the sympathetic vicarious one, that promotes an intuitive understanding of the characters where intellectual understanding is bound to fail.

Yet we do not merely re-enact the character's experience—on a repeated reading we are called upon to transcend it by reassessing their conduct and by granting it an expanded significance.

The reassessment of the characters results from a better comprehension of the details of the plot. On the first reading of the following episode, for instance, we are inclined to understand Benjy's assault on a schoolgirl in the street in terms suggested by the text itself: abandoned by the only person who understood his unarticulated meanings, Benjy seems to be making a pathetic attempt to overcome his muteness in order to talk to the schoolgirl about Caddy:

I was trying to say, and I caught her, trying to say, and she screamed and I was trying to say and trying and the bright shapes began to stop and I tried to get out. I tried to get it off of my face, but the bright shapes were going again. They were going up the hill to where it fell away and I tried to cry. But when I breathed in, I couldn't breathe out again to cry, and I tried to keep from falling off the hill and I fell off the hill into the bright whirling shapes.

(64)

On a repeated reading we know that Benjy is castrated in consequence of this incident. His assault on the schoolgirl must have looked like a sexual assault—we begin to suspect that it was so since Benjy cannot convey, or understand, the difference between sexual advances and regular communication. Such a possibility calls our attention to the metaphorical meaning of the word “say” (cf. the eighteenth-century euphemism “conversation”): both talking and sex are means of communication, of overcoming exclusion from the life of another, of a fulfillment in union; both can signify love. On the first reading both the literal meaning and the symbolic significance of the episode are eclipsed by the pathos of Benjy's frustrated search of his sister, a more powerful but less versatile expression of the theme of the need for love. Moreover, on the first reading it is difficult to understand that what Benjy recollects is his being etherized for castration. The episode does not convey the whole intensity of his horror: on the first reading this horror is screened by the incompleteness of reference and on a repeated reading our attention is divided between the contents of the passage and the need to decipher it, between the object and the medium of presentation.

If Benjy's assault on the schoolgirl has been sexual without his knowing it, then, by extrapolation, his love of Caddy may contain an element of incestuousness. This is indirectly borne out by Quentin's explicitly incestuous fantasies with which we are now familiar. Even in the absence of an a priori psychoanalytic bias, Benjy's character is thus reassessed on a repeated reading. He now appears to be not only a defenseless innocent, a victim of cosmic injustice, but also the most complete embodiment of the childlike possessive egotism common to all the Compson brothers.

Paradoxically, while on a repeated reading we become more critical of Benjy (and of Quentin whose brutal egotism and morbidity have likewise been screened by the diffusion of information and eclipsed by pathos on the first reading), our attitude to Jason is mollified. His character holds no more unpleasant surprises—we have already seen him at his worst. Conversely, a better understanding of the details of Section 1 offers insights into Jason's motivation. On the first reading of the scenes pertaining to Grandmother's funeral Jason seemed to be a mean boy with a middle-child syndrome. On a repeated reading we are more sensitive to the emotional vacuum in which Jason finds himself very early in his life:

After a while even Jason was through eating, and he began to cry.

“Now you got to tune up,” Dilsey said.

“He does it every night since Damuddy was sick and he can't sleep with her,” Caddy said. “Cry baby.”

(31)

Since this scene is placed before the references to Benjy's trauma at growing up and being put to bed without Caddy, on the first reading it is difficult to understand that Damuddy plays the role of a substitute mother for Jason, as Caddy does for Benjy. Our awareness of the analogy between Benjy's and Jason's emotional destitution is thus delayed until a repeated reading. While on the first reading the most prominent feature of the adult Jason's character is a craving for revenge, a repeated reading reveals that his real obsession is with getting back what he has lost:

I don't want to make a killing; save that to suck in the smart gamblers with. I just want an even chance to get my money back. And once I've done that they can bring all Beale Street and all bedlam in here and two of them can sleep in my bed and another one can have my place at the table too.

(329)

Jason does not know that what he really wants—the affection lost too long ago to be remembered—cannot be replaced by a fetish. Nor does he realize that his losses of the promised bank job, of the family property squandered on others, or of Caddy's money carried away by the eloping Quentin, are only emblems of his major loss. He eventually seems to understand that the symbolic weight of these losses does not measure up to the real value of endurance and survival. Jason's fight with an old man in the show caravan is followed by a relief that places things into perspective: nothing could have been as bad as senseless death; having escaped that, he can endure the rest, “lift up his tree and walk.”

The adult Jason's compensation for being emotionally orphaned is his role as head of the family, the role symbolized by his place at the table. This explains his insistence on going home for dinner despite the protests of his boss. It is not so much for Dilsey's cooking that Jason comes home: he needs the presence of his mother and niece at the table so that he might enjoy his precedence and his role of the provider.

The reduction of the reader's sympathy for Benjy and Quentin and the growing understanding of Jason on a repeated reading is the justice (the “even chance”) which Jason receives from the reader. The novel which condemns maternal coldness and parental favoritism¹⁹ first leads us through an analogous favoritism and then demands a rectification of this attitude. No similar adjustment of sympathies takes place in the Compson world: the reassessment of the characters is tantamount to a transcending of their experience.

Our movement towards a moral/intellectual stance unavailable to the characters also involves a passage from the orientational (explicative) to interpretative activity. On a repeated reading each of the sections reveals layers of significance that have been veiled by the diffusion of information on the first reading.²⁰ The delay in our response to these layers of meaning is associated with the hierarchy of the novel's values.

On the first reading of Section 1, diffusion of information obstructs our understanding of the symbolic connotations inherent in the novel's central image, viz., Caddy's climbing the forbidden tree in pursuit of the mystery of death. This image, surrounded by such details as the snake that crawls from under the house, the timid brothers who condone the action against their better judgement, the muddy drawers, and Dilsey's exasperated “You, Satan” (54), strongly suggest the story of the Original Sin, yet on the first reading we practically ignore these hints. Instead, we concentrate on the literal meaning of the episode since we are unaware of its compositional centrality.

As soon as Caddy settles down between the branches of the tree, the narrative moves to Benjy's memories of her drifting away from him and his temporary success in arresting her. These scenes form a clear pattern of their own, and we do not expect the narrative to return to the tree-climbing episode. Our memory of the image of the snake is further dulled by a sudden increase of confusion: in this part of the section the alternation of type face to indicate time shifts is often neglected. When the tree-climbing episode resumes, the snake seems to be just one of the pretexts for the children's bickering. The Sound and the Fury camouflages its allegorical element on the first reading.²¹

On a repeated reading the symbolic meanings are activized. What had seemed to reflect the associative sequence of the focalizer's memories now turns out to be a matter of structural calculation. Thus, though Benjy's flashbacks are usually not arranged according to the sequence of the events to which they pertain, the account of the evening of the grandmother's funeral is always resumed precisely at the point where it was discontinued. Therefore this time-layer is singled out from Benjy's other memories and forms the second major line of action, intertwining with the fictional present. Whereas on the first reading the confused stretches of the narrative foiled out the episodes presented with a degree of clarity, on a repeated reading the distortions of chronology foil out the two chronologically consistent accounts.

Moreover, since now we know that the tree-climbing episode will be resumed, the narrative shift that occurs when Caddy is hidden among the branches freezes the scene into a tableau and its memory lingers over the sequence of the scenes in which Benjy is losing his hold on Caddy.

Finally, the symbolic connotations of the tree-climbing image are enhanced by ingenious transitions between narrative blocks. The scene immediately following this image refers to Caddy's wedding:

[Versh] went and pushed Caddy into the tree to the first limb. We watched the muddy bottom of her drawers. Then we couldn't see her. We could hear the tree thrashing.

The tree quit thrashing. We looked up into the still branches.

“What you seeing,” Frony whispered.

I saw them. Then I saw Caddy, with flowers in her hair, and a long veil like shining wind. Caddy Caddy

“Hush,” T. P. said, “They going to hear you. Get down quick.” He pulled me. Caddy. I clawed my hands against the wall Caddy.

(47)

The transition is not effected through verbal association: in the wedding episode the word “see,” which forms the link between the two narrative blocks is never pronounced. In a way, however, the words “I saw them. Then I saw Caddy” are Benjy's mute answer to Frony's question “What you seeing” uttered in the tree-climbing scene.²² Benjy tries to catch sight of Caddy in the tree but she is hidden from his view. Instead, in his telescoped memories, he has a vision of her unhappy wedding. A connection is thus established between Caddy's pursuit of forbidden knowledge and the tragic outcome of her desire for romantic love.

If the symbolism of the Original Sin had been obvious on the first reading, we would have been inclined to connect it with Caddy's sexual promiscuity. On a repeated reading, however, under the influence of the earlier impression that the novel deals with a frustrated need for love,²³ we realize that the sin lies in the lack of love that excludes the children from the ritual and from their places in each other's lives—at a time when history forces them out of their traditional place in society. The diffusion of information is, among other things, a means of controlling interpretation so that the heavy-duty Scriptural symbolism should be read in accordance with the novel's scale of values.

Sections 2 and 3 provide a metaphysical, historical, and socioeconomic perspective on the story of the Compsons' decline and fall. In Section 4, the scion of the aristocratic family turns into a tired inconspicuous man in a small car in the street. Even though Jason can still rally at emergency, his history and emotions are incidental to the life of the community, in particular to the life of the black congregation at the Easter service.

If this impression of the family's and individual's diminishing importance had not been tempered by the strong emphasis on the need for love produced on the first reading, Parson Shegog's references to the passing of generations (his allusion to Ecclesiastes 1:4—“One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever”) would suggest that individual life, with its transient sounds and furies, signifies little. However, owing to the residual prominence of the novel's major theme, this allusion is understood to mean that certain basic principles and values remain unaffected by the passage of time.

Thus diffusion of information in The Sound and the Fury channels our attention to the theme of the need for love and defers our understanding of the symbolic layers connotative to this theme so that they should modify, expand, but not jam it. It encourages interpretative activity on a repeated reading by promoting a detached attitude yet it also controls interpretation. It leads us through an experience parallel to the characters' attitudes yet eventually invites us to transcend it by cautious reassessment and a delayed move from explicative to interpretative attention.

As has often been noted, numerous images and motifs of The Sound and the Fury are reminiscent of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Eliot's poem is based on massive allusions to the Holy Grail romances in which the waste land can be redeemed by the knight who asks the right question. No such knight is in evidence in the poem: his role is played by the reader who probes the meaning of the text. The reader of The Sound and the Fury is assigned a similar role. He has “to see” the Compson tragedy, “passionately” at first, and calmly thereafter, and integrate it into a broader perspective without losing sight of the poignancy of its central theme.

Notes

1. A “focal character,” or “focus,” is the character who provides the center of vision in a particular stretch of discourse. He is to be distinguished from the “narrator” or “voice,” who is supposed to be performing the narrative act; see Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay on Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980) 186-89. The Compson brothers cannot perform the acts of narration allotted to their sections: Benjy is mute; Quentin is on the verge of suicide; and Jason is too stubbornly self-righteous to have an urge for an apologia. It is the “omniscient” narrator whose voice we hear throughout the novel yet in the first three sections he imitates the thought processes or the idiom of the focal characters—he speaks with them instead of letting them speak; cf. Faulkner's remarks on telling Caddy's story “with” the three brothers, Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia, ed. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1959) 1. The grammatical first person of Sections 1-3 is a sign of the imitation. In Section 4 the focus is also attached first to one then to another character yet the styles of these characters are not imitated in the authorial discourse.

2. For a discussion of clues that help us identify time-layers see Olga W. Vickery, The Novels of William Faulkner (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1959) 32-34.

3. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New York: Random House, 1929) 12. All subsequent references in the text are to this edition of the novel.

4. André Bleikasten also mentions this effect; see The Most Splendid Failure: Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976) 69.

5. For a sensitive analysis of Luster's motivation see Thadious M. Davis, Faulkner's “Negro” (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1983) 76-83.

6. Prolonging defamiliarized perception is an aesthetic feat in itself; see Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965) 12.

7. Faulkner claims that he wanted to have the text of the novel printed in different inks in order to help the reader identify time-layers but that was too costly; see Faulkner in the University, 94. However, in Benjy's section Faulkner often neglects the cheap printing device that indicates the borderlines between different scenes, i.e., the alternation of italics with the regular type (e.g., 40, 46, and 53). Obviously, confusion here is not a case of malum necessarium.

8. In Genette's nomenclature such a technique is called “paralipsis,” see Narrative Discourse, 195.

9. Benjy's section, indeed, cannot accurately reproduce the flow of a disturbed memory; it merely conveys the impression of an underdeveloped mind; see Irving Howe, William Faulkner: A Critical Study (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975) 162.

10. Quentin seems to be trying to live in a Bergsonian durée rather than in time. Unless he frees himself from the consciousness of the passage of time, the appointed hour of suicide will arrive, and death be the only way of getting out of time; see Perrin Lowery, “Concepts of Time in The Sound and the Fury,” English Institute Essays, 1952, ed. Alan S. Downer (New York: Columbia UP, 1954) 71-72, and Julie M. Johnson, “The Theory of Relativity in Modern Literature: An Overview and The Sound and the Fury,” Journal of Modern Literature, 10 (1983): 227.

11. Cf. John Irwin's psychoanalytic interpretation of Quentin's suicide, Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1975) 44 and 116 ff.

12. In his attempt to account for the structure of The Sound and the Fury Faulkner betrays a preoccupation with the reader's response. He says that Caddy was “too beautiful and too moving to reduce her to telling what was going on” and so “it would be more passionate to see her through somebody else's eyes.” Faulkner in the University (1). The word “see” (“see her” rather than “present her”) suggests anxiety about the “eyes” of the reader.

13. This theme may be disquieting in its simplicity yet psychologists would not question its importance. Abraham H. Maslow, for instance, notes that “considering all the evidence now in hand, it is probably true that we could never understand fully the need for love” no matter how much we know about such prepotent needs as the hunger drive; moreover, “from a full knowledge of the need for love we can learn more about general human motivation.” Motivation and Personality (New York: Harper and Row, 1970) 21.

14. Cf. Lawrance Thompson, “Mirror Analogues in The Sound and the Fury,” English Institute Essays, 1952, 90.

15. As I. A. Richards notes, in reading, as in life, “expectation as a preparation for certain stimuli may lower the threshold for them,” so that we receive them the more readily. Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1926) 89.

16. Davis interprets Quentin's relationship with Dilsey in racial terms: “the white girl reaches out for Dilsey as a mother substitute and rejects ‘the nigger’ who could never be her mother.” Faulkner's “Negro” (93). Yet it is no less important that Dilsey cannot satisfy Quentin's emotional needs because her psychic energy is all but exhausted. This aspect of Dilsey's portrayal distinguishes her from the “mammy” stereotype of Southern fiction.

17. In Quest for Failure: A Study of William Faulkner (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1960) 151, Walter J. Slatoff discusses the ambivalence of our attitude to Caddy as an instance of Faulkner's typical irresolution.

18. This is the phenomenon of “foregrounding”: the “foregrounded” manner of presentation competes with the mimetic contents for the attention of the reader; see Boris Ejkhenbaum, “How Gogol's ‘The Overcoat’ is Made” and “The ‘Skaz’ Illusion” in Jurij Striedter, comp., Texte der Russischen Formalisten, I (München: Wilgelm Fink, 1969) 122-58 and 160-66.

19. See Linda Wagner, “Jason Compson: The Demands of Honor,” The Sewanee Review 79 (1971): 556-60. The article contains an excellent study of the scenes of Jason's childhood yet overstates its defense of the adult Jason. Another interesting reassessment of Jason's character is made in Donald M. Kartiganer, The Fragile Thread: The Meaning of Form in Faulkner's Novels (Amherst: U Massachusetts P, 1979) 14-16.

20. For some of the interpretations on which the scope of the paper does not allow me to dwell see Richard Adams, Faulkner: Myth and Motion (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1968) 215-48; Jean-Paul Sartre, “On The Sound and the Fury: Time in the Work of Faulkner,” Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. Annette Michelson (New York: Collier, 1962) 84-93; and Carvel Collins, “Christian and Freudian Structures,” Twentieth Century Interpretations of the Sound and the Fury, ed. Michael H. Cowan (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1969) 71-74.

21. By ignoring the symbolism of the episode we re-enact the attitude of the children, who, as Faulkner noted, see the “lugubrious matter of removing the corpse from the house,” their first encounter with death, “only incidentally to the childish games they [are] playing.” Faulkner at Nagano, ed. Robert A. Jeliffe (Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Press, 1970) 103.

22. See Dorrit Cohn's discussion of analogous cases in Quentin's section, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978) 251-53.

23. Cf. the discussion of “the primacy effect” in Meir Sternberg, Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1978) 99 ff., and Menakhem Perry, “Literary Dynamics: How the Order of a Text Creates its Meaning [With an Analysis of Faulkner's ‘A Rose for Emily,’]” Poetics Today, 1 (1979): 53.