how he does not really love anybody, even the baby Narcissa is carrying, and about how his driving of the car will never change. They know, as we know, and as Faulkner points out to us, that this period with Narcissa is nothing but an interlude, a delay in the inevitable progress of Bayard toward his appointed violent end.
Unit V—pages 283 to 299—follows the pattern already established and still to be repeated once more near the end of the novel, by taking us from Bayard and Narcissa to Horace. The focus is on Horace as he waits for Belle to get her divorce in Reno. Horace and Narcissa have their last meeting, and in his usual ironic and brutally accurate way, Horace summarizes the futility of his life and his helplessness to do anything about it. He knows what sort of a future he will have with Belle and tells Narcissa about it. Their day together over, she returns to Bayard and the Sartoris household. The second part of this Unit is devoted to the strange brief affair between Joan, Belle’s sister, and Horace. She has come to Jefferson, she says, to find out what he is like, and in a manner similar to his relationship to Belle, he succumbs to her aggressive sexuality until she leaves as abruptly and as mysteriously as she appeared. It is a puzzling episode because Joan is a kind of female Bayard whose violence and aggressiveness take a purely sexual form. Perhaps she is a purer embodiment of the motive that is intrinsic to Belle, and yet another example for us of Horace’s helpless passivity.
Unit VI—pages 299 to 338—return us to Bayard and begins very abruptly with yet another car accident. In an attempt to avoid another car on the muddy fall roads, Bayard is forced to drive off the road and down a steep bank near the graveyard—appropriately enough. It is during the descent that old Bayard has his heart attack and dies—just as Dr. Peabody and others said he would. From this point on to the end of the Unit, the focus is exclusively on Bayard. Faulkner does not have to tell us what Bayard’s response to the death of his grandfather is: we know it is in the same category as his response to the death of his twin brother and of his first wife and son. It adds more guilt and greater torment. When we see Bayard next, in this masterfully done Unit of the novel, he is riding his horse Perry to the MacCallums. He has begun his long flight, his futile attempt to escape his destiny, that will last until his death on June 20 in Dayton, Ohio six months later. It is December, and near Christmas. He goes to the MacCallums, who do not know of old Bayard’s death, and stays with this wonderful country family of non-destructive males long enough to hunt a bit and sort out what he will do. The stay with the MacCallums is unusual because we see none of the violence and destructiveness we know to be part of Bayard’s character. It is a peaceful, tranquil time, but clearly just another interlude, another delay in his relentless progress toward his inevitable doom. The MacCallums are clearly meant to be seen as a contrast to the Sartoris family, not just socially, but because the males do not have destruction bred into their genes—even those, who, like Bayard, have been to the war. When Bayard leaves, the day before Christmas, he has decided on flight and heads for the nearest train station. On his way there we have the wonderfully done scene with the impoverished Negro family, including the Christmas meal they share with him. There is no comedy here. In fact, it is one of the few times in the novel that Faulkner does not treat the blacks comically. The Unit ends when Bayard gets to the train station. Everything in this Unit is masterfully understated; though we know of Bayard’s anguish, it is never mentioned, and is always dealt with in terms of his futile attempts to escape it.
Unit VII—pp. 339-347—returns us to Horace and once again juxtaposes masterfully done episodes involving these two opposing but similarly defeated males. Horace’s story is finished off here. It is, somewhat ironically, spring. Horace is now married to Belle and has begun his “new” life with her by moving to another nearby town. Little Belle is with them. Horace is writing Narcissa a letter when the Unit begins; much of the Unit consists of Horace’s ironic meditation upon his fate (futility, defeat) and what he takes to be the fate of mankind. Just as Bayard’s last Units (VI and VIII) consist mostly of actions, so Horace’s consist mostly of thoughts with an occasional ironic action. After he finishes his letter, which ends with the ironic “Belle sends love, O Serene,” Horace goes off to mail it and pick up the shrimp that are shipped in once a week for Belle’s delectation. Our last image of Horace is of him walking home with the dripping box of shrimp. “C. S. Carrier of Shrimp. H. Benbow, M.A., LL.D., C.S.” (345)—he thinks to himself as he lugs the shrimp home, stopping now and then to change hands. His ironic mediation on the fate of man continues and the Unit ends as he approaches his house, with Belle, red hair piled up on her head, still in a negligee, watching his approach suspiciously from the window, full of anger and frustration and “sullen discontent” at her present situation. It’s a great section. “She had ghosts in her bed” Horace says as he mounts the steps to his house.
Unit VIII—pages 347 to 358—takes us back, first indirectly (through postcards and telegrams), to Bayard in his flight across country, to Mexico, to Rio, back to San Francisco, then to Chicago and Dayton. In Chicago, we encounter him again, directly, in the fury and violence of his despair and torment. He is in a bar in Chicago and so potentially violent that he scares even the girl he is with. It is in this same bar that we also see the defeated Harry Mitchell—a rather neat touch on Faulkner’s part. The last we see of Bayard is when, testing a defective experimental plane, he crashes when the wings come off. It is June 20, 1920. Bayard’s story is finished and his tormented life has come to an end. What he could not accomplish in the war, or in his car, he finally accomplishes here, dying, as his twin did, in an airplane.
Unit IX—pages 361 to 370—is devoted to the Sartoris women, the survivors. Coincidentally, we are told that Simon has been killed philandering, which also brings his story to an end. The only story that begins here at the end is that of Benbow Sartoris, born the day his father was killed. But it is a story that is never completed by Faulkner. It is the women, the survivors, he is interested in here. We follow Aunt Jenny first. With her usual good sense and fortitude, after yet another death of yet another Sartoris male, she takes to her bed to recover her equilibrium. After she has done this, she visits the graveyards—both black and white—and the graves of all the dead Sartorises, as well as that of Simon. It gives us a nice symbolic image of one main concern of this novel. (Horace has also gone into his own graveyard with Belle.) We now switch to Narcissa, who has just had her son christened Benbow Sartoris hoping, we assume, that by avoiding John and Bayard she can somehow help him avoid the fate of all the previous Sartoris males. The novel began with old Bayard and old man Falls and the heroic legends of the Sartoris males and Confederate generals. We end here with the last three adult Sartoris males all dead (John, Bayard, old Bayard) and with the other significant male in the novel, Horace, defeated (if not dead). At the very end, we have Aunt Jenny, who has survived all these dead males, and Narcissa, who has the last Sartoris male we ever hear anything about. Everything is really brought to a conclusion here. Bayard has come and gone, into and out of Narcissa’s life; into and out of life itself. Narcissa returns to her “serenity” with her son, not really sorry Bayard is gone. Aunt Jenny, indomitable as ever, carries on and leaves us, at the very end, with an appropriate wry, ironic comment on Sartoris males—fools and scoundrels all, she says, whatever their first names.
By the end of this novel, you certainly have to wonder what the two families portrayed here—the Sartorises and the Benbows—have come to, and why. One can see two ideals, two sets of values operating in these families that Faulkner is going to come back to again and again: the heroic ideal of the Sartorises which always manifests itself in and must realize itself in action; and the intellectual, idealistic, word-centered ideal of Horace Benbow, which manifests in itself and realizes itself in inaction, in an inability to resolve certain kinds of contradictions, in passivity, in an excessive verbalization of life itself. We see this with great clarity in Mr. Compson and Quentin (in both of his novels) and later, in Hightower. I suppose we also see it in Darl, who certainly perceives the contradictions but cannot resolve them. And, of course, we see many variations of the action characters in Faulkner, some, like Bayard, driven to destruction, as Joe Christmas and Thomas Sutpen are, some just driven to action, as Jewel is. Jason is the ironic man of action in The Sound and the Fury. Caddy is the woman of action in that novel, driven, as Bayard is, but in a much different way and by very different motives.
True to its title,
