In William Faulkner’s novel, The Sound and The Fury, he explicitly engenders Caroline Compson in order to allow her character to make a strong impression on any reader. With that engenderment it causes a seemingly abortive meaning of her importance to the novel. Granting that she appears as a negative character throughout the novel, if looked at closer, she makes a noticeable gyration at receiving sympathy from readers, due to her vast confusions of what is expected of her. Even though, Caroline is a non-sympathetic character who exhibits a demeanor of selfishness, egotistical behaviors and the lack of affection, with a different perspective, one might extract more compassion and understanding towards her by realizing a perplexity to which she was foreseen to be.
William Faulkner purposely fabricates Caroline Compson to be portrayed as a non maternalistic character in The Sound and The Fury. A colossal moment, in which it is shown, is the sense of selfishness that is exercised by her. The way she portrays selfishness is her use of guilt specifically towards her family and the Gibson family, with intentions of receiving remorse from them. “It’s all my fault. I’ll be gone soon…” (Faulkner 39). Caroline’s goal in this quote is to obtain reassurance from everyone around her to make sure she is still wanted and to increment her lack of self-esteem. Mrs. Compson also verifies to the readers that she feels that giving birth to her son, Benjamin, was a punishment from a vengeful God, “I thought that Benjamin was punishment enough for any sins I have committed I thought he was my punishment for putting aside my pride and marrying a man who held himself above me I don’t complain I loved him above all of them because of it because my duty...
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...uld have. Mrs. Compson will always be trapped in what role she should have in life and sadly that is all she cares about. She will never find her true soul nor did Caroline want to inquest for it, she just expects to be cared for and wanted by others that will never be able to fulfil her true desires.
Works Cited
Castille, Philip Dubuisson. “Dilsey’s Easter conversion in Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury.” EBSCOhost. Web. 8 May. 2013.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and The Fury. Ed. David Minter. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc: 1994. Print.
Padgett, John B. William Faulkner on the Web. University of Mississippi, 2001. Web. 5 May. 2014.
Weinstein, Phillip M. “If I could Say Mother”: Constructing the Unsayable About Faulknerian Maternity.” In Faulkner, William The Sound and The Fury. Ed. David Minter. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc: 1994. Print.
Faulkner, William. "Barn Burning." The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. 3th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. 1554-66.
16. James Hinkle and Robert McCoy, Reading Faulkner: The Unvanquished. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 141.
Gwynn, Frederick L., and Joseph Blotner, eds. Faulkner in the University. Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1959.
William Faulkner uses multiple narrators throughout The Sound and the Fury to depict the life of Caddy Compson without telling the story from her point-of-view. Benjy, a mentally disabled 33 year old, Quentin, a troubled and suicidal Harvard student, and Jason, a racist and greedy man, each give their drastically different sides of Caddy’s story to create an incomplete chronicle of her life. Faulkner’s first chapter explores Caddy’s life through the silent narrator Benjy. As a result of Benjy’s inability to talk, much of how he describes the world is through his heightened sensory awareness. Benjy constantly repeats the fact that, which, to Benjy, symbolizes Caddy’s innocence (Faulkner 6). Later in the novel when, Benjy realizes that Caddy has lost the innocence Benjy once idolized and loved (Faulkner 40).
In As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner uses the characters Anse and Cash, and a motif/symbol in "My mother is a fish," to reveal the psychological and societal problems of the twenties and thirties. Written as soon as the panic surrounding the stock market in 1929 started, Faulkner is reported as having, “took one of these [onion] sheets, unscrewed the cap from his fountain pen, and wrote at the top in blue ink, 'As I Lay Dying.' Then he underlined it twice and wrote the date in the upper right-hand corner"(Atkinson 15) We must take care to recognize Faulkner not as a man of apathy, but one of great compassion and indignation at the collapse of the economic foundation of the U.S. This is central in appreciating the great care with which he describes the desolation and poor landscape of Yoknapatawpha County, which is where As I Lay Dying takes place.
... Now, because Editha remained naïve about the issues of war and the loss of her husband, she resumed to believe that sending George off was the right decision. “If Editha had changed her views, she would have had to admit to herself that she sent George off to die in a war and fought for the wrong reasons. Why live with the guilt when there is the ability to pretend that George died for very noble purposes” (Belasco and Johnson 113-24). Editha limits her fault by remaining unaware and therefore feels innocent of the harm she’s inflicted on the people she cares about. The significance of the stories is to appreciate life for what it’s worth. We are given a chance to create something extraordinary and trying to change those around us will affect us for the worst. The accepting of others for who they truly are is what defines the character of one person from the next.
Her unsympathic attitude towards the characters in her stories could be seen in the way she structured that characters, situation, and the environment they’re in. She often structures the character to be very proud, and the pride of these people would not allow them to admit defeat or loss to the situation; but would instead continue to infest itself in the characters’ minds making putting them in to a false reality that they are somehow more superior then people surrounding them, by certain attributes such as their social class, race, knowledge, or heritage. Example of character like these would be Julian and his mother in her story “Everything Rises Must Converge” Julian mother was finds pride in what her grandfather was; and she finds herself to be fragile in the present state of the world for what it had changed into; but was unwilling to show her weakness to people around her. As for Julian his problem was that he was a failure to a certain extent, considering that he was a grown man still living off his mother; but yet he feels the need to not be overpower by his mother, but was unable to do so in any other but to do so by judging her judgement and, behaviour towards the African Americans.
Many mothers, regardless of age or situation, share sympathetic life ideals. They all share the common goal of raising their children wholesome; they want to create an environment of love, nurture, and support for their children as well. A mother’s effort to implant good values in her children is perpetual; they remain optimistic and hope that their children would eventually become prosperous. However, some women were not fit to be mothers. Thus, two different roles of a mother are portrayed in As I Lay Dying written by William Faulkner. Faulkner uses the literary technique of first person narrative with alternating perspectives. By doing so, Faulkner adds authenticity and the ability to relate (for some) to the two characters Addie Bundren and Cora Tull. The first person narrative acts as an important literary technique because it allows the reader to experience the opposing views of Addie and Cora; they are both mothers who act as foils to each other because of their diverse opinions and outlooks on motherhood, religion and life.
On September 25, 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, a son was born to Murry Cuthbert and Maud Butler Faulkner. This baby, born into a proud, genteel Southern family, would become a mischievous boy, an indifferent student, and drop out of school; yet “his mother’s faith in him was absolutely unshakable. When so many others easily and confidently pronounced her son a failure, she insisted that he was a genius and that the world would come to recognize that fact” (Zane). And she was right. Her son would become one of the most exalted American writers of the 20th century, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature and two Pulitzers during his lifetime. Her son was William Faulkner.
...ation, she is his ultimate view of womanhood. He creates this woman who he builds up to perfection, only to bring her back down. By placing Caddy Compson as the anchor character of the book, Faulkner gives a voice to his own feelings about women.
By reading closely and paying attention to details, I was able to get so much more out of this story than I did from the first reading. In short, this assignment has greatly deepened my understanding and appreciation of the more complex and subtle techniques Faulkner used to communicated his ideas in the story.
Literature: From Faulkner and Morrison to Walker and Silko, American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. Print.
Zender, Karl F. "The Politics of Incest." Faulkner and the Politics of Reading. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. 1-31. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Thomas J. Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Trudeau. Vol. 170. Detroit: Gale, 2006. Literature Resource Center. Web. 4 Feb. 2014.
Faulkner, William. “A Rose For Emily.” An Introduction to Fiction. 10th ed. Eds: X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. New Yorkk: Pearson Longman, 2007. 29-34.
In William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the image of honeysuckle is used repeatedly to reflect Quentin’s preoccupation with Caddy’s sexuality. Throughout the Quentin section of Faulkner’s work, the image of honeysuckle arises in conjunction with the loss of Caddy’s virginity and Quentin’s anxiety over this loss. The particular construction of this image is unique and important to the work in that Quentin himself understands that the honeysuckle is a symbol for Caddy’s sexuality. The stream of consciousness technique, with its attempt at rendering the complex flow of human consciousness, is used by Faulkner to realistically show how symbols are imposed upon the mind when experiences and sense perceptions coalesce. Working with this modernist technique, Faulkner is able to examine the creation function of symbols in human consciousness.