We are going to study an excerpt from the « Quentin section » in The Sound and the Fury written by William Faulkner and first published in 1929. The whole part takes place on the day when Quentin commits suicide. It is told from his point of view, using the method of stream of consciousness, filtering reality through individual consciousness. From a technical aspect, this enables us to link the novel to James Joyce’s Ulysses which depicts the wanderings in Dublin of the main character taking place also during a single day of his life, contrasting heroic past and degraded present, which is not without echoing Quentin’s own situation. The passage appears as suspended moments taking sense through the imminence of Quentin’s death and his own awareness of it. Childhood memories, and more generally his past take on an overwhelming quality creeping into present events using details having a specific significance for the narrator as a channel. We will see that, similarly to shadows mirroring his motions and emotions the pastoral view offering itself to Quentin reflects his state of mind, offering a further possibility of explanation to his paradoxical relation with his parents. We will illustrate that notion through his perception of the Negroes as embodying the South and stable familial values as opposed to decadent aristocratic values and finally through his relation with time, memories and his surroundings in the passage.
Everything Quentin sees seems to affirm Mr. Compson’s cynical view of life. He can find no ethical system of values to overthrow his father’s negative view of the world. He is the voice that utters words and ideas, a voice of the past that does not fade and stays forever as a background in his mind.
During his childhood Mr. Compson should have played a positive role as a central figure for Quentin by passing down the aristocratic southern set of values. Before the Civil War, the family was at the center of the Old South which was a patriarchal society, the concept of family metaphorically reaching the boundaries of the society since it was based on agrarian economy where, in counties, a few families formed the dominating influence. Yet, this notion retains some contradictions since households held black slaves to work in the plantations and that they could not be accepted as being a part of the whole which would have been going against tradition and purity of lineage. The father was an heroic figure. After the Civil War, with the decline of the South declined the aristocratic families and their values. The Compsons as pictured in the Compson Appendix seem to be related to this state of things and the explanation for their fate could be found in the society to which they belong. In fact, they are still retaining the attitude they had before the Civil War, clinging to family honor. Mr. Compson passed on a notion of the family’s aristocratic values to his son, but maintained a fatalistic view of life taking root in the belief that the decline of the family is inevitable and his mother remained cold towards her children confining herself into self-pity and hypochondria. Quentin apparently focused on the concepts of purity and order as the foundations of his sense of morality and constantly struggles to reject the unshakable detachment and pessimism pervading his father’s notions of southern morality. On the opposite he was raised by the black servants, along with their children, whose central values concerning family are wholesome and becomes aware in that excerpt of the importance of the supportive role they played. He misses « Roskus and Dilsey and them ». In Harvard, Quentin is sharply estranged from the South, with only memories to rely back on and his surrogate family have an important place in it, Dilsey symbolizes the « squelette nécessaire et nécessairement indestructible, tisse et retisse la toile de l’espace-temps, restaure la relation, nourrit, soutient, acquiesce, chante la résurrection et la vie—assure le retour: la valeur du Retour et le retour des valeurs. » (Philippe Jaworski, « Mellville/Faulkner »). She comes to represent a hope for the renewal of traditional Southern values in an uncorrupted and positive form. The Black person besides whom he sits functions as a synecdoche and triggers whole sections of memories which will expand on the whole scene. Negroes become the expression of meaningful values that would represent humanity and love that he lacked from his physical parents. Quentin makes of them symbol of comfort and a motif of strong values « like a sign put there saying You are home again. » and later he says « I thought of home. » This longing for home can be explained by the fact that his reliance on outdated ideals leaves him completely vulnerable to the reality of the modern world in the North. Black people create a link to pleasant memories of the past symbolized by the expressions « home again » and « I thought of home » that are bringing a form of order out of the vision created by his disjunction with northern values.
The longing for home is also a longing for lost innocence represented by the Negro and the mule which would embody the ingenuity and innocence before the fall and bring answers to his collapsing view of the world and shattered ideals. The description of the Negroes’ moral pattern according to Quentin is introduced by « looking back » which might be a manner of stressing the fact that he does no want this vision to vanish. Quentin describes him with terms such as « childlike »; « means too barefaced to be called subterfuge even «; « frank and spontaneous admiration » and « unflagging tolerance ». The Negro and his mule become evocative of opposite values to that of the decadent Southern aristocracy and consequently of his parents’ distorted values as well as his own sense of honor and the grief and guilt resulting from it. In fact, all the aspects that he sees in this peculiar Negro may be understood as his own fantasies, reflecting the evocation of all past pleasures of childhood and the pleasant way his « black family » behaved with him, acting on him as a sort of regressive movement that evokes « toy monkeys and wagons and candy in sacks ». Thus Negroes are seen as an opportunity to be reborn in innocence and freed from the bounds of guilt and meaningless notions of honors as applied to his family. They are the essence of an ethical system of value which would compensate for his father’s negative view and would bring relief to his obsession with it, he is seeing them also as the characterization of endurance and benevolence or kindness. He points out that these were notions which had been replaced in his mind by the painful revolt and helplessness felt in front of values that overpower him, « which I had forgotten ».
The pastoral vision of the black and his mule corresponds with notions of ingenuity but it might also be an image of the slow, backward looking north in the context of the beginning of the century and the feeling of unchangeableness of the notions embodied by the South. But more specifically, the picture of the Negro and his mule seems to be defying the passing of time which is obsessive for Quentin as threatening him to forget what is primordial to him, the grief that he felt when his code of values was perverted. Firstly, we may point out that the encounter happens at « a road crossing » which in the Mississippi Delta, is a setting that takes on a specific meaning, being the place where Heaven and Earth symbolically meet. The Negro and his mule seem to be a living testament to ancient and unalterable things, as if he had always been there « carved out of the hill itself ». He appears to be related with the natural setting which is described as « the eternal mountains » and « the thick sky » while he is referred to with terms as « motionless and unimpatient; timeless patience » and « static serenity ». The reunion of the two elements comes to symbolize an unspoiled landscape and an unspoiled humanity resisting the passage of time. The white fences could symbolize a frame for a picture out of time or the cultural barrier embodied by the north that cuts him off from what the landscape represents. Quentin assists a vision of American wilderness of which he gives an account painted with pictorial quality reflecting the Old South’s indigenous quality through the Negro with his mule and the image of an immobile, massive landscape mirroring the unchangeable quality of the South.
Thus the Negro represents all what he could aspire for, for example, the possibility to evade « responsibility and obligations » which would be the only way for him to escape the finality of death. He is confronted with what he sees as a complete reversal of his values, and a state of innocence that is now unattainable for him. As a result, nostalgia for those who represented comfort, for his hometown and for all that represented the pleasures of childhood seizes him and takes on a tragic meaning since he is not to see his homeland again.
Quentin bases his thoughts on emotions and sensations which allows him to be in a state of intense awareness of what surrounds him. It is as if on the verge of death, at the twilight of his life, midway between sleeping and waking « the train was stopped when I waked… », the truth of the world was being revealing through details. He is piercing the mask of appearances.
Quentin’s statement that Black people are « a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among » establishes a parallel with Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man which deals with the necessity of clinging to an identity of one’s own. Ralph Ellison’s main assumption is that in a racially divided society, black are not granted a true identity but are mirrors and receptors for the projections of white men’s fears and fantasies and are therefore invisible. From this point, the narrator will try to figure out on what basis his relations with society should evolve. He does not wish to withdraw from a society even it it cannot see the essence of his being but he does not want either to engage with the world on a false basis he had before. Quentin too is somehow « not a person so much as a form of behavior ». In fact, « despite his feverish preoccupation with ethics, he is unable to perform any ethical actions himself » (Olga W. Vickery, « The Sound and the Fury: A Study in Perspective »). The difference is that he will choose to withdraw in death since he is confronted with what appears as an unsolvable dilemma. Another withdrawal is that despite the knowledge and the significance of black people for him, he is ready to deny it to conform with conventions, in spite of the fact that this goes against that he believes and his emotions. He does what others expect of him, and considers others as they consider themselves without disrupting the image they have of themselves but incorporating it. He accommodates with the way people behave with Black people in the North and what they expect his behavior to be. Consequently he is also an « obverse reflection of the white people he lives among ». This is reflected by the syntax which is characterized by the use of polysyndeton which conveys the effect of an endless cycle of thought where Alpha and Omega meet, a crossed syntax playing on the occurrences of the verb ‘to think’. This demonstrates the mingling between what he thinks and he thinks they think.
Thus, the purity of his relation to black people is spoiled in the North and the fact that he cannot clear away the nostalgia of the lost brotherhood is like a confession of guilt in regard to social conventions. His spontaneity towards them is challenged by conventions and the two are set in conflict. This may explain the offering of a quarter to the Black man as a symbolical gesture to confront or lessen the guilt that this situation may provoke. The custom is reversed and it is Quentin who is offering something. His tone when he addresses him is one of simplicity and almost affection, he will adopt the same attitude with the little Italian girl later in the section. The girl was reminiscent to him of his sister Caddy when he would be able to play with her, as the man could be of his playing with his black comrades. This could be seen as an example of how Quentin cannot reconcile the present with the past, and is constantly trying to recapture past relationships through current occurrences of events that have a peculiar meaning for him. This denote his difficulty to reconstruct the values that the present embodies and his desire for all present experiences to conform with past values. Quentin cannot see time as future time it is only duration which « is essentially the continuation of that which no longer exists into that which exists » (Henri Bergson cited in Myra Jehlen, « Faulkner’s fiction and Southern society »). The fact that the difference between time present and time past is to some extent blurred can be seen in his statements that present events as well as past ones escape him, « But I didn’t know that I really had missed Roskus and Dilsey and them until that morning in Virginia »; « How long he had been there I didn’t know »; « Which I had forgotten. »
The shadow symbolizing the relentless progress of time and acting as a reminder of the imminence of his death is absent from this scene. We could think that there is a break in the continuous, threatening passing of time, and evasion into memory untainted by his forthcoming act but though it is not apparent, Quentin bears the weight of the instrument that will bring him down into the water « But they felt heavy enough in the air ». The first sentence refers to the flat-irons he bought for this purpose. They are present, tested in the air, gauged but not referred to, as if to postpone the inevitable yet underlining the irrevocable fatality.
To conclude, we can say that Quentin’s looking at external events as a way to discover meaningful values offers a contrasting insight in the dual relationship between the North, embodying modern America and the Old South as seen through decadent aristocratic values. Quentin is in constant search for meaning, being confronted with the mystery of his father’s values that he strives to unravel, in the same way as Captain Delano tries to reconstruct the truth of the San Dominick events by seeing through appearances. But ultimately both characters are confronted with the same failure and the same impossibility to see present event from a sufficient distance that would allow them to have a clearer insight.