Dilsey, Infinity, Anchors, Feelin’ Life, and Meaningless Words

            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.

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