The Strength of Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury

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The Strength of Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury

In The Sound and the Fury, the fated Compson family is a portrayal of both the declining old South and the new South that rose demonically out of its ruins. Through the Compsons, Faulkner personifies at once the mournful self-pity of a fallen gentry, and in Jason, the embittered rage and resentment of those who come after the fall. Throughout the novel, Dilsey is the one quiet fortitude in this irredeemably tragic and fallen family.

One of the first indications of Dilsey's strength in the Compson house is attested to by the fact that she can tell time from the warped clock that hangs in the kitchen. This clock and its skewed rendering corresponds with the Compsons' own inability to reconcile themselves to any rational concept of time. Quentin is long tortured and eventually driven to suicide by his morbid nostalgia; "... time is [Quentin's] misfortune..."(97). Jason's resentment of the past has driven him to his maniacal obsession with hoarding money, in preparation for an abstract future that will never, can never become a reality. Dilsey's ability to make sense of the broken clock reveals that she has made a sense of time eternal, a sense that allows her to live free from the grip of the past and the anticipation of the future. Through her responsibility for the Compson family, and the fact that she is the sole person with whom this responsibility lies, she is inextricably bound to the present-- to project onto Dilsey a past or future seems inappropriate and irrelevant. Dilsey's present however is not Benjy's present, comprised simply of one moment to the next; through living the present, Dilsey transcends it.

That Dilsey is st...

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... beckons Benjy to a peace -- ultimate and eternal.

Faulkner gives the reader a final testimony to the eternal quality of Dilsey's strength in her section of the appendix, that comes after the sections devoted to the other blacks of the novel. Simply writing "they endured"(302), Faulkner affirms that Dilsey has led her family to salvation, to stand long after the fall of the Compsons. At the end of the novel, Dilsey returns home: "... the fire had died down. There was no sound in the house... there was no sound anywhere."(265). Dilsey outlasts "the sound and the fury" of the fatally self-centered Compsons, to remain long after them, indomitable and knowing. In bitter irony it is Dilsey who, in Faulknerian terms, not only endures, but prevails.

Works Cited

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage Books, 1984.

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