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| William Faulkner Carl Van Vechten, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons |
Morning settles over Jefferson, Mississippi like a heavy quilt, warm with the scent of rain-soaked earth and magnolia blossoms. A man stands at a fence, fingers curled around the cold metal, breath puffing in soft clouds.
His eyes are wide, childlike, following every movement on the road. This is Benjamin Compson—Benjy—thirty-three years old, yet the world moves for him the way it moves for a very young child: full of sharp sounds, sudden colors, and memories braided so tightly with the present they cannot be undone.
A sound rises from him, low and broken, almost a moan.
Luster, the young boy tasked with watching him, rolls his eyes. “Now hush, Benjy. Ain’t nothin’ there.”
But for Benjy, everything is there. The present melts open, spilling into an older afternoon.
The sound of girls laughing becomes the rustling of trees from years before. The fence fades, replaced by a riverbank, the scent of cold water, the feeling of Caddy’s clean dress brushing his cheek. He sees her climbing a tree, her muddy drawers showing, and feels again the warmth of her hand when she helps him up the hill.
The name change burns in his memory, though he never understood it.
The sky brightens. The house stands nearby—white columns, fading elegance, a hint of rot along the edges. Benjy turns toward it, longing, because inside that house once walked the one person who could quiet the world for him.
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| English: Published in New York by Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith . Illustrator uncredited., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons |
Inside him, sound becomes color. Color becomes pain.
When the church bell rings, the air fills with long echoes. Benjy rocks, moaning softly. Luster snaps, “Hush up, Benjy! You gon’ have everybody lookin’.”
But Benjy cannot help it. The bell reminds him of a night of bitter cold, when he and Caddy stood at the gate and she tried to soothe him. Snow fell like drifting feathers. He remembers her whisper:
“Hush. I’m here.”
But she isn’t here now. The house smells different without her, sharper, thinner. The voices inside long ago stopped speaking her name, as if silence could erase her.
Benjy moves inside, led by Luster. The halls hold ghosts—warm hands on his shoulders, the swing of a dress around a doorway, the soft hush of a sister who loved him without condition.
He reaches for her in every shadow he passes.
But the shadows close around him, empty.
II. June 2, 1910 — Quentin and the Weight of Time
Harvard Square wakes with a crisp northern wind rustling through elm leaves, and Quentin Compson walks through it like a man carrying an invisible burden. His dark suit is immaculate; his hands tremble barely enough to notice. Bells chime in the distance—tall, cold college bells—and he flinches as though struck.
Every striking note is a reminder: time is moving, and he cannot slow it.
He walks past students laughing under the shade of brick buildings. Their carefree voices seem to come from another world. Quentin’s thoughts drift far from Harvard, far from Massachusetts, far from any place that might offer him peace.
Caddy.
Her name is a pulse in him, quickening with each step.
He steps into his room, where sunlight angles through the window, illuminating motes of dust that float like tiny ghosts. The room is neat, almost obsessively so. Quentin sits at his desk and opens his pocket watch—his father’s watch. Its ticking fills the air, steady, relentless.
But Quentin has been fighting it all his life, clinging to a past he cannot remake.
The watch ticks louder.
He smashes it against the corner of the table.
The ticking continues.
Quentin’s breath shudders. He bandages the watch with torn cloth, muffling its sound, but he knows he cannot silence time. Not really.
Outside, the day goes on: streetcars rumble, bicycles squeak past, women in long dresses hurry to appointments. Quentin walks through the city as if the ground beneath him were made of memory instead of brick.
At the bridge over the Charles River, the water glimmers like a sheet of glass, calm and indifferent. Quentin stares at it, and the river becomes another river—one in Mississippi, where he once watched Caddy wade barefoot, her dress held delicately above the current.
“Quentin,” she had said long ago, “don’t you worry so much.”
Her laughter once felt like a shield against a world he didn’t understand. But later, her laughter became the thing he feared most—because it meant she was changing, becoming someone he could not protect.
Now the memory clings to him like a vine around his throat.
Sometime in the afternoon, Quentin wanders into a bakery and buys two small loaves of bread. The sweetness in the air reminds him of the kitchen at home, where Dilsey once fed him warm biscuits on cold mornings. The woman behind the counter smiles at him, unaware of the storm inside him.
Back on the street, a small child bumps into him and bursts into tears. Quentin kneels, offering the bread, soothing the child gently. For a moment, tenderness steadies him. But soon the memory of home washes that moment away.
He walks until dusk, past lamps flickering to life along the cobblestone paths. His mind is an echo chamber of Caddy’s name, his father’s cynicism, the smell of honeysuckle, and the relentless ticking of his stitched watch.
The burden slips from his shoulders.
The water closes over him in silence.
III. April 6, 1928 — Jason’s Rule of Iron
In the fading light of late afternoon, Jason Compson sits at a desk in the general store, counting money with the sharp precision of a man who trusts nothing—not the future, not people, not even himself. His jaw is clenched tight enough to ache. His fingers shuffle bills briskly. This is how he keeps the world in order: numbers, anger, and suspicion.
Outside, Jefferson hums with small-town noise. Cars rattle down the dusty road, children shout near the square, and the faint smell of cottonseed oil drifts on the wind.
Miss Quentin, Caddy’s daughter, moves through the house like a flame—bright, unpredictable, dangerous. Jason resents her existence the way he resents breathing. She is a burden he believes he inherited unfairly, and he keeps every penny of her support checks, inventing excuses, lies, and rules she never agreed to.
This is how he maintains control: one cruel hand gripping someone else’s future.
Evening shadows stretch long across the street. Jason closes the accounts, locks the drawer with a sharp click, and steps out onto the wooden porch of the store. The boards creak under his weight. He watches people pass with narrowed eyes, always expecting betrayal.
When he returns home, the Compson house sits heavy in the dusk, its paint peeling, its porch sagging like a tired sigh. Voices echo inside—Miss Quentin’s sharp retorts, his mother’s anxious ramblings, Dilsey’s calm instructions from the kitchen.
Jason enters like a storm.
Miss Quentin darts past him, her skirt swirling. Jason grabs her wrist. She jerks away.
“Where you been?” he snaps.
“Out,” she says, chin lifted in defiance.
“With who?”
“None of your business.”
Jason seethes. His anger burns hot and fast. He shouts about morality, responsibility, money—things that have little to do with her and everything to do with the fury inside him.
Luster watches from a corner, eyes wide. Benjy stands by the banister, moaning softly in distress at the raised voices. Miss Quentin storms upstairs. Jason follows, pounding on her door, threatening, snarling.
In her room, she hides letters—letters from a man Jason disapproves of not because he cares for her, but because she defies him by caring for anyone at all.
Later, when the house quiets, Jason opens the locked box beneath his bed and counts the stolen money again. The bills whisper in the lamplight, familiar as old wounds.
But beneath all that certainty is a fear he never names:
And he cannot stop it.
IV. April 8, 1928 — Dilsey’s Steadfast Heart
Easter morning rises slowly, light spreading across the sky like soft gold paint. In the kitchen of the Compson home, Dilsey moves with steady purpose. The stove crackles as she stirs breakfast, humming a hymn under her breath.
Dilsey has worked for the Compsons longer than any of them can remember. Through their tempers, sorrows, pride, and downfall, she remains the one true pillar of the household—unbent, unbroken.
Benjy sits at the table, sniffing the air like a child waiting for a familiar comfort. Dilsey pats his shoulder.
“Soon now,” she murmurs. “We gon’ get you fed.”
Upstairs, Jason tears through Miss Quentin’s room, discovering she has fled the house, taking his hoarded money with her. Rage consumes him. He shouts orders. He demands the car. He curses everyone and everything.
Dilsey watches him with quiet sorrow.
She sees a man eaten alive by bitterness, but she spares no words. She simply helps Benjy into his coat, preparing to take him to church. Luster hovers nearby, adjusting his Sunday jacket, feeling the nervousness of a boy who must act older than he is.
Jason storms out of the house in pursuit of Miss Quentin, tires skidding through dust, fury propelling him toward a chase he is destined to lose.
At church, the sanctuary glows with stained-glass light. Voices rise in a warm swell. Dilsey sits with Benjy and Luster, her hands folded, her face calm. She listens to the choir, feeling something she has never felt so strongly before—a sense that endings and beginnings often grow from the same root, and that suffering does not rule forever.
Benjy rocks slightly during the hymns. Dilsey steadies him gently.
The preacher’s voice echoes off the walls with fire and tenderness. Dilsey’s eyes brim with tears.
“I sees de beginning, en now I sees de endin’,” she whispers.
When they return home, the house feels hollow. Jason has not returned. Miss Quentin is gone. Mrs. Compson lies in her room, claiming illness with the faint dramatics of someone who believes suffering is a performance.
Dilsey makes supper. She helps Benjy settle in the parlor. She moves through the house with the dignity of someone who knows the world can wound deeply but cannot break a soul that chooses love.
Evening descends, soft and dusky.
For the first time in a long time, the house seems aware of its own silence.
V. The Fall of the Compson House — A Southern Elegy
Across the four days that shape The Sound and the Fury, the Compson family falls in slow, painful spirals.
Benjy lives in a world where past and present shimmer together like overlapping reflections in a pond. He feels love and loss with the same breath, unable to name either.
Quentin, bruised by honor, memory, and his own impossible ideals, chooses a river’s quiet depths over the roaring of time he cannot endure.
Jason rules with iron and fire, building his existence on control and cruelty, desperate to hold onto a legacy already rotting beneath his feet.
Dilsey endures. She loves. She remains.
And always, at the heart of every memory, every wound, every echo, stands Caddy Compson—bright, rebellious, loving, flawed—and gone.
She is the fragrance of trees in spring, the sound of a young girl’s laughter, the soft warmth of a hand on a brother’s cheek. She is the absence that shapes the present.
When the sun sets on the final day, the Compson house stands silent, its halls filled with fading footsteps, its legacy crumbling like old paint. Outside, the world moves on.
But in the quiet corners of memory—in the mind of a man at a fence, in the river where a watch stopped ticking, in the rooms where anger boiled, in the pew where a woman whispered truth—echoes linger.
And amid those echoes, something tender remains:
A family shattered, a world changing, and the fragile hope held by the one person who never stopped caring.
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