Psychotic Breakdown, Free-floating Rage, and Sanity: The Techniques Faulkner Uses to Express Consciousness in “The Sound and the Fury”

In William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the first chapter is told from the point of view of Benjy, the youngest son, in the first person, in stream-of-consciousness. The second chapter is told from the point of view of Quentin, the oldest son, in the first person, in stream-of-consciousness. The third chapter is from Jason’s point of view, in the first person, in coherent (but unreliable) narrative.

Faulkner doesn’t put Jason’s chapter in stream-of-consciousness because that’s not how Jason experiences the world, so it wouldn’t be an appropriate way for Faulkner to communicate Jason’s consciousness, his experience of reality. Benjy is severely mentally handicapped, and Quentin is having a psychotic break, so they experience the world in stream-of-consciousness, with no coherent “story,” no overall coherent picture of the world. Jason Compson, on the other hand, has a coherent worldview, though extremely selfish, bigoted and somewhat paranoid.

Also, Jason is unaware – unlike Benjy and Quentin – of many of his thoughts, feelings, and sensations, and the details of the world around him. Sensations – past and present – are central for Benjy and Quentin, are what they experience, and for Quentin his consciousness is also central, his thoughts, his wandering and frantic intellectuality. Jason is probably oblivious to sensation, and is not self-conscious – he is probably oblivious to almost everything but bitterness and free-floating rage and hate, and self-interest – those events or factors that could get him money or cost him money – and events or factors that could give him something to sneer at, or an opportunity to hurt someone in some way.

Jason has a coherent–indeed, dominating – “narrative,” worldview, and he interprets everything according to that distorted perspective. So it is appropriate for Benjy’s, and Quentin’s, consciousness to be communicated in stream-of-consciousness, and Jason’s consciousness in coherent narrative.

The fourth chapter is told in omniscient, third-person narrative. Dilsey, the old, long-suffering, African-American servant, is the protagonist of most of this chapter. Faulkner uses this technique for three reasons:

1. Dilsey is sane, coherent, and connected with the outer world, and not self-conscious – her mental world doesn’t revolve around herself.

2. This technique allows Faulkner to describe Dilsey’s dignity and nobility as objective truth, rather than another flawed perspective (as Frederick J. Hoffman mentions in William Faulkner). If the whole book were told from Dilsey’s point of view, in first person, she would seem like a reliable narrator, but in The Sound and the Fury the reader has read the viewpoints of the mentally handicapped Benjy, the psychotic Quentin, and the paranoid, bigoted, sadistic Jason, and in that context the reader would wonder how much to trust Dilsey.

3. Faulkner can also write in the fourth chapter about what happens when Dilsey’s not around – e.g., Jason’s misadventures looking for Miss Quentin and the man in the red tie, Luster’s trip with Benjy to the cemetery.

Faulkner uses several devices in the Benjy section to render Benjy’s mental handicap. The Benjy section contains very few pronouns (as Olga W. Vickery points out in The Novels of William Faulkner); it mostly uses names; this illustrates Benjy’s inability to describe people in terms of relationships (e.g., mother, father, sister), or categories that they fall into (black, white, old, young, child, adult, man, woman).

Periods are used instead of commas after quotations–e.g., “’I forgot your coat.’ T.P. said.” This emphasizes the act of speaking, makes it look like a sentence. Benjy doesn’t take the act of their speaking for granted; it doesn’t recede into the background for him – unlike to adults who “rank” what happens by importance – i.e. some things seem more important than others. Benjy’s mind is somewhat like a baby’s or a child’s mind.

An adult mind usually thinks in terms of, “This happened, causing that to happen”; but Benjy thinks in terms of, “This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened,” with no connection between them, no sense of cause and effect. This is illustrated and portrayed by sentences such as: “The room went black, except the door. Then the door went black. … [The dark] went away … Then the dark came back, and [Father] stood black in the door, and then the door turned black again,” instead of:

“The lightbulb was turned off, leaving the room dark except for the light coming into the room from the hallway. Then the door was closed, leaving the room dark. The lightbulb was turned on again. Then it was turned off, and Father stood silhouetted in the doorway, and then the door was closed, leaving the room dark again.” Like a toddler, Benjy cannot make even the simple deductions necessary to understand these simplest of relationship between causes and their effects.

The lack of punctuation at the end of many of the sentences in the Quentin section reflects Quentin’s confusion, the incoherence of his thoughts. Sentences are left unfinished, with no punctuation mark at the end; they begin in the middle, with a lower case letter; sometimes they interrupt other sentences, appearing in the middle like a parenthesis. In the flashbacks of the Quentin chapter, long sections occur that are, for the most part, fairly coherent narrative, but with all the punctuation removed. At one point Quentin is recalling what Gerald’s mother said, coherently, in quotation marks, and Quentin’s stream-of-consciousness is inserted in the middle, in italics, like a parenthesis.

The amount and force of Jason’s invective reflect his free-floating rage, and he has a “gift” for invective, for sarcasm and verbal abuse. And his sadism is shown not only in his behavior (e.g., dropping the tickets that Luster wants into the stove), and in what he says to others, but even in the narrative technique that Faulkner uses to portray his consciousness. In the first paragraph of the Jason chapter, Jason (as narrator) reports what he says to his mother without quotation marks:

“Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say. I says you’re lucky if her playing out of school is all that worries you,”

Rather than:

“’Once a bitch always a bitch,’ what I say. I says, ‘You’re lucky if her playing out of school is all that worries you.’”

There isn’t even a comma followed by a capital letter, after “I says,” to mark what Jason says from his narration. The blending of Jason’s narrative and his speech to his mother, in the first paragraph, show how what Jason says is not only what he says, it

is what and how he thinks; and this blending and blurring also shows how Jason’s thoughts and feelings – especially his bitterness and anger and free-floating rage – come out, almost involuntarily, like lava from a volcano, in what he says. And this

blending and blurring suggest the intensity of these feelings of Jason, these forces inside him, and how they drive him. They also suggest his unawareness of feeling, sensation, and the details of life–he moves, and his inner world moves, at too fast a pace. Benjy, Quentin, and even the abused, hard-working Dilsey don’t seem to be in any particular hurry; they can, at least sometimes, experience the details of life (even if Benjy does so without understanding, and Quentin does so in a desperate and psychotic way); but Jason’s “narrative,” his “story,” his coherent but distorted perception of reality, prevents him from experiencing the details of life.

All the words beginning with B at the end of the Jason chapter also express Jason’s anger, his free-floating rage.

This book avoids linear narrative; it starts with Benjy, ending in 1928–and Benjy’s sense of time jumps back and forth, from the turn of the century to April 7, 1928, and many points in between. Then the book goes back to June 2nd, 1910, in the second chapter; this is Quentin’s “present,” and in it different “sections” of time flow together and shift; the setting of the story shifts from one point to another, out of chronological order.

(The Quentin section gives more clues to what is the past and what is the present: the present is written in a more coherent form, with traditional punctuation, while the scenes in the past have little or no punctuation at all. In the Benjy chapter, the time-shifts are sometimes marked with short sections in italics, which are short separate flashbacks set in a different time than the sections set in “roman” type, which are themselves in different times from each other.)

The effect of this non-linearity is that the story is robbed of its linear progression.

A conventional novel would begin at the beginning and go on through the middle into the ending, so the reader would wonder, “what will happen?” The focus would be on what would happen in the future (i.e., the part of the novel the reader hadn’t reached yet). But in The Sound and the Fury, the first words the reader reads are: “April seventh, 1928,” the time when Benjy is experiencing the last events that occur in the first chapter, and one of the last few days in this story, in which the events that the readers have experienced have begun many years ago, around the turn of the century.

These are some of the techniques that Faulkner uses in this book, and the effects that he accomplishes with them.