Sticking
to the metaphors, if the Compson family is a lost ship at sea, Dilsey is its
anchor. Dilsey can’t do much to fix all
of the madness that occurs in the Compson family. Like an anchor, she stays in one piece while
the rest of the family falls to bits. Dilsey
offer the reader a different model of a family, a loving, dependable, and happy
one. She offers a different a model of
authority that Mrs. Compson does. Mrs.
Compson cries and complains, while Dilsey remains silent. She hums as she makes breakfast, but her
motions are quiet, understated, and effective. She is everything Mrs. Compson
isn’t. Dilsey seems like a rather easy
character to overlook as most characters forget that she’s the reason that the
Compson house doesn’t collapse.
When she’s in church, on the
other hand, Dilsey finds peace in Christ.
She finds a perspective that allows her to say, "I've seed de first
en de last," […] "I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin"
(Faulkner 180). Unlike the other characters,
Dilsey understands time, and doesn’t cry stay in her memories. Dilsey’s sense of time is religious, as she
looks forward to redemption and not death.
She has a sense of time that moves forwards, not backwards, which is why
her section is narrated in a third-person voice since the reader can understand
her sense of time.
The
strange, exotic Faulknerian voice seems to have disappeared completely in
Dilsey’s section. At one point, this
section quotes, “The day dawned bleak
and chill, a moving wall of gray light out of the northeast which, instead of
dissolving into moisture, seemed to disintegrate into minute and venomous
particles, like dust that, when Dilsey opened the door of the cabin and
emerged, needled laterally into her flesh, precipitating not so much a moisture
as a substance partaking of the quality of thin, not quite congealed oil.” (Faulkner
187). Faulkner’s tone is incredibly
literal at this point, and the narrator is relaxed and in control of the story. As a reader, I love it because it’s a
reminder of just how crazy the other sections of the novel actually are.
As many of you already know after finishing
the novel, Faulkner
decides to confuse the heck out of the reader and change voices throughout The Sound and the Fury. He does this to show the unique sides of each
of the Compson brothers. They’ve all got
different views of their family and sorrows. By combining all of these, Faulkner allows the
reader to see just how similar the Compson brothers are. They all think about
Caddy A LOT, and contemplate on their childhood. The reader gets to get inside characters’
heads and see what it’s like to be Quentin, Benjy, and Jason.
The reader gets to see Quentin,
Benjy, and Jason’s perspective, but never Dilsey’s voice. Faulkner doesn’t want to narrate the
experiences of a woman, as all the women in the novel are only talked about. The reader gets to hear Mrs. Compson lecture Quentin,
but that’s nothing compared to the narrations of the three boys. This is a novel about women, or more importantly,
men’s experiences of women. Faulkner also isn’t comfortable narrating the
experiences of a black character. The
novel is still centered on a white perspective of racial relations. Faulkner believes it would be wrong of him to
imagine himself in Dilsey’s world.
Finally, Dilsey’s the only character who’s not focused on her own
personal world. Therefore, speaking in
the third-person accurately reflects her perspective. She cares about other’s fates that she
actually does have an accurate perception of herself. She doesn’t need to think all the time, like Benjy
or Quentin. Dilsey doesn’t need a strong
"I,” and is more concerned with others than herself.
The
"sound and fury" comes from a very famous play Macbeth. Faulkner loves tragedy,
which is why he chose to use Macbeth’s quote, “(life) is a tale told by an
idiot, signifying nothing.” Macbeth
is a play about a man and his family’s world falling completely apart. The Sound and the Fury is about several
men’s worlds and their family falling apart.
The "tale told by an idiot" seems a reference to Benjy’s
section of the novel. After all, he
"bellows" all the time, a bellow "full of sound and fury.” On the other hand, Quentin’s not so brilliant
in matters of the world, and Jason isn’t much better, so it’s difficult to
interpret who Faulkner really refers to as the "idiot.” Plus, nothing even happens in this book. Most books have a climax that drives the
story, but in this novel, there’s nothing. Just like Macbeth’s reference to life, this book
is just a bunch of words on paper that doesn't signify anything. The book isn’t saying life is meaningless,
but rather that words represent meaning but its meaning that words can’t
communicate. At times, words aren’t good
enough to describe life, and sometimes you just have to feel it (like Benjy
lol). Despite all this confusion, what
the heck, The Sound and the Fury still manages to be a pretty great novel.
