is the pure victim, one of the most pervasive kinds of characters in Faulkner; and he can never be anything else. There is no way to redeem him from his condition, and Faulkner was never much interested in the other kind of redemption. Faulkner’s life-long interest in and use of Christian symbolism in his novels is always secular and frequently ironic. It was redemption in this world that Faulkner was interested in. He is not really a religious novelist at all. The novels with the most Christian symbolism—this one, Light in August, Requiem for A Nun and A Fable are concerned with redemption (or lack of it) in this world and not with salvation and transcendence into some other. This is nowhere more evident than in A Fable where every Christian detail is carefully naturalized and secularized. Why does he set The Sound and the Fury on Easter weekend, then? For irony, I would say. Dilsey is no redeemer, nor is Ben. The Compsons are beyond redemption. Only Dilsey, of all the characters in this novel, has any of the Christian virtues—love, charity, compassion, pity, and an almost complete lack of discrimination in her view of the Compsons and in the way she acts toward them all; these virtues do not necessarily redeem her in the Christian sense; that is never a point in this novel; they raise her up to a noble, human level above the other characters because the force of what she does is always felt here in this world and is never construed as acts to earn her salvation in the other world. Ben is not a redeemer or a martyr; he is a poor, pitiful genetic accident. If we stretch the Christian/Easter symbolism, we can say that he is the lowly victim only Christ would bother to save. That point seems incidental to the novel and a distraction from the central concerns of it.
Quentin is very different from Benjy. He is the first son, not the last; he is the hope of the family and trapped in family expectations, obligations, and pieties. In a sense, he got it all, including Benjy’s pasture, and wasted it all when he committed suicide. He is the most verbal and complex of the children. He has the greatest number of possibilities. Ben has the least amount of being and Quentin probably has the most. But in many ways he is as hopelessly entrapped by his family inheritance as Ben is, but his is double, multiple entrapment. He has almost no being apart from the family. He is the most family conscious: Father, Mother, Caddy, sister, Jason, Ben, brother run like mounting debts through his section. The recurrent motifs of Quentin’s sections (aside from the pervasive family one) are time, Caddy (sister), Father said, virginity (purity and the loss of same), and incest. The overwhelming characteristic of this section is its verbalness, especially its concern for abstractions and Quentin’s capacity for verbal elaboration—a kind of uncontrollable laying on of words. Benjy has no words. The main characteristic of Benjy’s sections is its basic, raw experiential content. Quentin sometimes seems to be nothing but words, to have interposed so many words between himself and objective reality that action becomes a central problem. Put the other way around, it seems that Quentin has abstracted experience into words and concepts (something Dilsey never does, nor Caddy; but something which Mr. Compson, Mrs. Compson, and Jason do all the time) and that the separation between words, concepts, (what is possible inside his head) and experience (actuality) becomes so great that it is finally intolerable. Put in other terms, the separation between what Caddy was (before her fall) and is, and what he wants her to be, is so great that it becomes intolerable. Unable to reverse time and undo it, unable to talk what Caddy does away (Caddy does it because she likes it because she can’t help herself), unable to go back to or retrieve that time of symbiosis, he kills himself. He moves from “I was” to “I am” to “I am not.” He exercises the one absolute control he has—which is over his own being in time.
The central fact about Benjy is his idiocy; the central fact about Quentin is his suicide, his self-destruction. He escapes his various entrapments by this means. Unable to stop time or to reverse it, he simply removes himself from it. The “peacefullest words” he knows, Quentin says, are “and then I’ll not be” (174). In a study of destructive and generative being in Faulkner, it is certainly worthwhile to try to find out why, in his first great fiction, Faulkner has the character with the greatest amount of being self-destruct, as if too many words and too much being are by their very nature self-destructive. Or was it too much family? Caddy does not self-destruct, nor do Jason and Quentin II. Benjy has no choice in the matter. The other self-destroyer is Mr. Compson who after Caddy’s fall and Quentin’s suicide chooses a means Faulkner often turned to during his life: self-destructive drinking. The father and the first son seem to be the self-destroyers; they are also the most verbal in the highest level of discourse. Mr. Compson’s prevailing mode here, or in Absalom, Absalom! is irony. But we hardly know enough about Mr. Compson to even speculate about him, as I am doing here with Quentin, so I will concentrate on Quentin.
Mr. Compson is a voice that keeps sounding in Quentin’s head. No mother’s voice sounds in there because Quentin does not have a mother to tell him something different from what his father tells him. “If I’d just had a mother,” he says, “so I could say Mother Mother” (172). The words he hears in there are all male words. What we have in this novel is the reverse of what we find in As I Lay Dying, where the dominant voice is Addie’s, the mother, and the empty meaningless voice is the father’s—Anse’s. What the novels have in common is a single dominant parent. Anse and Mrs. Compson, the ineffectual ones, have a lot in common. But Mr. Compson does not destroy, or destroy the generative being, of his children. It is a novel about a family in the last stages of destroying itself. Caddy does not destroy Quentin, either; it is Quentin’s inability to accept what Caddy is and does once she moves from childhood into adolescence and becomes sexualized that destroys him. Once you move past auto-eroticism, sexualization is a deep, often uncontrollable need for others—in Caddy’s case, men. Quentin has a male, extremely old-fashioned view of Caddy as female—a view which neither Mr. Compson nor Caddy ever suffers from. It is specific to Quentin. Incest is not the real problem with Quentin, purity is. Incest would be a way of keeping Caddy from being possessed and contaminated by others. It would be a way to maintain the childhood symbiosis. It would keep Caddy from going away, since the inevitable consequence of sexualization is to move out toward others and away from the pre- and non-sexual family. Quentin has a very abstract, idealized, possessive, private, and insular view of his sister as woman. He’s trapped in this view and can’t get out of it. This view is larger than his sister, although it seems to be through her that it affects him the most deeply. This view, in conjunction with what Caddy does, puts Quentin into the classic double bind: the two can’t go together and he can’t get rid of either one. Quentin does not kill himself for his sister, he kills himself for an idea of purity which he can’t hold on to, keep to himself, preserve intact. Ike McCaslin has this same impulse to preserve, but he manages to do it without actually self-destructing. It is the idea he can’t give up; it is the inexorable, inevitable, necessary contamination of things (and persons and relationships) once pure that he can’t stand. It is the movement out of childhood and early adolescence that he can’t stand.
Faulkner is full of characters who suffer from this malady; of characters who fixate and set permanently in childhood or early adolescence and then can never change. In Quentin’s case, all of his actions after Caddy’s fall and marriage to Herbert are really purely mechanical; he’s just biding his time, discharging his duties to his mother from a rather perverse and defective, certainly exaggerated and idealized sense of filial duty. It would have saved everyone a lot of money and anguish if he had just killed himself before he went to Harvard. At every point—unlike Benjy—Quentin has choices which he transforms into necessities. In this sense, he is also the opposite of Jason, who has few choices and is the purest victim of circumstances in the novel. Quentin is victimized by an incapacitating idealism, which is a function of the capacity Benjy is born without. This is what makes him self-destruct. It is also, later, what makes Sutpen destroy so many others and what makes Horace Benbow so unintentionally destructive in Sanctuary. It was a long time before Faulkner wrote (or was able to write) a novel in which a character put idealism into effective, non-destructive action.
Jason, the third child, the second son, the mother’s son (as Quentin is the father’s son and Caddy the father’s daughter) is, again, very different from both Benjy and Quentin. Faulkner goes from the youngest, with no words and the least amount of being, to the oldest, with the most words and the most amount of being, to the middle brother and son, who is also highly verbal, but in a much more mechanical and manipulative
