Time is but a concept that has the power to organize society, influence actions, and change inexorably. While infinite, it is not abundant, and the fact that, once it is gone, it cannot be regained, is unnerving. However, as time continues, people can become fixated on a period in an effort to reclaim lost time. William Faulkner explores the challenges when it comes to overcoming the past and looking forward to the future in The Sound and the Fury. He uses different perceptions of time to show how the Compson family is driven by the past and cannot see the future. The Compson family is stuck in a perpetual state of time, and as time progresses, they are left with their decaying values of the past.
Faulkner opens with a “tale told by an idiot”
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While time was absent to Benjy, time is essential to Quentin. His obsession with clocks stems from his father. As Quentin recalls, Mr.Compson said, “I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experiences which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it” (Faulkner, 76). Instead of following the cynical words of his father, Quentin does the opposite and he tries to conquer time. To Quentin, time is always one step ahead of him; as new postbellum ideals come alive, Quentin must adjust in order to keep up with time. However, he struggles to adapt because of his father’s nihilism. Quentin fears moving forward and forgetting the past because he figures that, if he forgets the past, then his father is right, and all of the things he has done have been for nothing. Quentin wants deny that notion because he uses morals and values to define himself. If all things in the past mean nothing, then life is meaningless and values that were once upheld and values that are coming into place don’t matter in the …show more content…
As the quote implies, Jason who holds grudges which ultimately leads to him living in the past. Like his brothers, Jason takes a position on Caddy. He believes that Caddy cheated him out of a job at the bank because her marriage was broken off after it was revealed that Herbert was not the father of her baby. As justification, he steals the money that Caddy sends to Quentin and keeps it for himself. He does so without question because Mrs.Compson is convinced that Jason can do no wrong, for she considered him a Bascomb rather than a Compson: “...you are a Bascomb, despite your name” (Faulkner, 182). Despite being the only child to receive his mother’s love, he does not return the favor, and rather, he uses for his own selfish motives. Jason’s selfishness comes from his desire for justice since he feels like the world has wronged him, so he blames others for his present state. He blames his father for allowing Quentin to escape and go to Harvard because he feels like he deserves to be given the opportunity to start anew. Even after Mr.Compson’s death, Jason continues to speak ill of him: “I says, ‘I reckon he’s entitled to guess wrong now and then, like anybody else, even a Smith or a Jones.’ [Mother] begun to cry again. ‘To hear you speak bitterly your dead father,’ she said.” (Faulkner, 182). Jason blames his family for situations he can
What happens when predators become prey? Does the prey fight and survive or surrender to their fate of being hunted? In “The Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury and “Being Prey” by Val Plumwood you read about the deadly consequences of becoming prey. The conflicts of each story are alike, as well as the setting and protagonists of the stories. The two texts resemble one another through their literary elements.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and The Fury. Harrison Smith and Jonathan Cape, 1929. Corrected text, Vintage Books, a division of Random House,
events that may be an influence on Jason’s behavior and adaptation to his home life, home life
Brooks says Benjy has no more sense of time than an animal has. Quentins obsession with his past makes him resent the future. As for Jason “he is only concerned with something that has to be done and is incapable of any real living. ”3 On the other hand Dilsey has no oppressed feelings about time.
Throughout the Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut displays the clash between free-will and destiny, and portrays the idea of time notion in order to substantiate that there is no free-will in war; it is just destiny. Vonnegut crafts this through irony, symbolism and satire. And he successfully manages to prove that free-will is just a hoax that adopted by people that cannot percept time fully.
“If all of this seems long ago and far away, it is worth remembering that the past is never past.” (Faulkner cited in Ellison, P.274)
Have you ever been given rules, but you don’t follow them? Well, in the stories “Being Prey” and “A Sound of Thunder” the main characters do that. They are curious or scared and break the rule, they were given to keep them safe. They don’t know what to do so they just go for it. The main characters deal with dangerous conflicts and different settings. They realize they should have listened at the end of the stories.
Time’s passage, an unstoppable, eternal occurrence, manifests itself in our daily lives. Everybody has a different outlook on time: we either have plenty of it or are running out of it! Time, a construct developed by man, turns the tables and now controls the lives of its creator. We measure our own successes with how time affects us individually. Objects that are considered timeless are treasured whereas something worn down by time has lost most of its value. In As I Lay Dying, The Working Poor, The Great Gatsby, A Streetcar Named Desire, and The Scarlet Letter, William Faulkner, David K. Shipler, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, and Nathaniel Hawthorne demonstrate the classes differing attitudes towards time. Though the social classes
Bergson’s philosophy apparently influenced Faulkner’s notion of time, an admission he has made in an interview with Loic Bouvard. He remarked, “In fact I agree pretty much with Bergson’s theory of the fluidity of time” (Lion in the Garden 70). In the Bergsonian scheme, man experience time as period, a continuous stream, according to which, past, present, and future are not rigid and clear-cut points of difference in time, but they flow in one’s consciousness, persistently impacting one another. From this angle, the past is not strictly past; on the other hand, it is conserved in the present as a living force that influences the way in which one undergoes the present. Furthermore, in different interviews, Faulkner explained that his outlook of time was linked to his aesthetic view:
The concept of time travel is quite abstract. Its mysteries and wonders are unfathomable to the average human to the point where it may leave one wondering how it works and even how it affects everyday life. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife both depict two very different stories of men dealing with the burden of unmanageable time travel. Billy Pilgrim and Henry DeTamble demonstrate both negative and positive impacts that uncontrollable time travel has on external relationships. Both men experience difficulties with familial relationships; for Billy, it is with his daughter and for Henry, it is with his wife. In both cases, they are faced with conflicts from onlookers, whether it is WWII comrades or family friends. Aside from the negative impacts, Billy’s relationship with a lover is strengthened, as well as Henry’s with his daughter.
First of all, I think that Sound and Fury was an appropriate film for us to view and analyze in this class. I enjoyed the lecture given after we viewed it, epically because it was brought to my attention that the follow up film was funded by people who make cochlear implants. We were reminded that not all documentaries are non-fiction or unbiased! I really appreciated that because I love watching documentaries (I think I needed that reminder). I also enjoyed the film, I thought it was interesting because I knew very little about the deaf word before. I have a hearing friend whose parents are both deaf, Sound and Fury made me much more curious about her childhood and how she and her sister developed speech. It also opened my eyes to how important deaf culture can be to deaf people!
When the Tutor enters the scene, he expresses a much more cynical view regarding Jason's decision to leave his wife. He asks the nurse, 'Have you only just discovered / That everyone loves himself more than his neighbor? / Some have good reason, others get something out of it. / So Jason neglects his children for the new bride'; (85-88). The Tutor feels that Jason's leaving Medea is only a part of life, as 'Old ties give place to new ones';. Jason "No longer has a feeling'; for his family with Medea, so he leaves her to marry the princess who will bring him greater power (76-77).
Moreover, one might want to examine how time and space are interconnected in the novel: we may wonder how the idea of chronotope of time and space is developed in the novel: if we trace major and minor chronotopes in the novel, which are the dominant ones, can we single out the only one for the whole novel? Also, how do time and space influence the process of emergence of the protagonist?
...using this character as the fulcrum of the novel, Faulkner is able to open up the minds of these three young men. The omniscient viewpoint, otherwise known as “Dilsey’s Section,” demonstrates her function as the backbone of the otherwise spineless Compson family, while not compromising Caddy’s connection to each narrator. Aside from addressing the family’s collective ruin, The Sound and the Fury also tracks Caddy’s fateful descent from a beautiful, rebellious young woman into a desperate, selfish outcast. Faulkner purposely includes four different viewpoints in an effort not to allow Caddy to remain beautiful to the reader. Without the deterioration of her pride and charm, the fall of the Compson family would not be complete, for one survivor suggests durability. In fact, the only witness to their tragedy is Dilsey, who, as Faulkner noted, “endured” (Faulkner 348).
In this manner, all through his section the narrator not only describes but also interprets what he observes. His narration then invariably reflects his opinion based on his individual impression. From this angle, the narrator’s “point of view is neither that of an all-seeing and all-knowing narrator nor that of a detached and strictly objective observer” (Bleikasten, The Most Splendid Failure: Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury 175). It is only less subjective than those of the Compson brothers. In this sense, Michael Millgate considers