A sense of "authorial design" in William Faulkner's "The Sound And The Fury" does not appear until the second section of the book, narrated by the suicidal Quentin, although the seeds of this design are planted in the first pages of the novel, in the first section narrated by Benjy, in the form of allusions to future events to be foreshadowed. However, we are not immediately aware of their presence or effects until certain elements of Benjy's confusing narrative are resurrected, embellished, and expanded upon in later sections of the story. It's only in hindsight, looking back at the early parts of the story, that we realize that this sense of design and clever structure was there all along. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay. The initial evidence for this is only minimal and of no great overall importance to the narrative, but it serves the larger purpose of linking together the events described in the first, third, and final sections of the book by not only allowing us to piece them together chronologically, but also allowing us to discover for ourselves the causal chain of events that led to their appearance in the first place. “Aren't you going to help me find this neighborhood so I can go to the show tonight,” Luster asks Benjy in the novel's opening passages. Later, having failed to find it, he asks Jason for a quarter, to which Jason replies, "I thought Dilsey was going to get a quarter of Frony for you." Luster says she did and admits he lost it. He eventually receives a quarter from Caddy's daughter, Quentin, and there is no further mention of it until the third section of the novel, which takes place the day before the first section, in which Luster again asks for a quarter to Jason so he could go to the show; he does not receive it. This is simply a trivial plot point, except for what it reveals about the destructive and sometimes malicious nature of Jason's character when he burns the tickets to the show Luster wants to go to, rather than give them to Luster. . This is similar to when his father and his namesake order Benjy's castration and, if not as bad as that event, it is at least more illogical and unreasonable, even if Jason doesn't see it that way. However, even with its lack of narrative relevance to the novel as a whole, this plot point highlights and supports the novel's conception in two ways. First, as a purely structural element, it connects two distinct sections of the story - the first and the third - and thus forms a bridge across the chasm of Quentin's section, so that we can determine for ourselves- same order of continuity in which these events take place. Second, as a more thematically resonant element, it allows us to witness Jason's harsh behavior and thus allows us to establish the connection between him and his father. The fact that he bears his father's name is not, in itself, evidence of design. - but we suspect a designer is at work when Quentin, Caddy's daughter, shares a name with Caddy's brother, and when Benjy, who was once Maury, shares - like Quentin - a name with his uncle. This is evidence of design because it is too fortuitous not to be deliberate; and if it is deliberate, then it must serve a purpose. This goal is to inspire the reader to investigate why these characters might share a name and what those names might mean - and, ultimately, this goal is to compare and contrastcontrast individuals who share this name. It is this technique of juxtaposition and mimicry - of contrasting scenes with later scenes and of one individual with another individual, and also of comparing scenes and individuals - that suggests a design to the novel, with great objective for this purpose: namely, to illustrate the reasons for the fall of the Compsons without illustrating them explicitly. We only realize that the reasons for their downfall have been illustrated to us when these scenes and individuals are compared and contrasted in hindsight. We can then go back and evaluate the previous elements in order to see the cause of the decline: its instigator. , Caddy. Consider Benjy's first memory in his section of the novel: "Caddy took off her dress and threw it on the bank. Then she was down to just her blouse and her drawers, and Quentin slapped her and she slipped and fell. in the water. » In a single paragraph, the events of the entire novel are set in motion. Caddy, aged seven or eight, first asks Versh to take off her dress for her – an omen of the burgeoning promiscuity that will ultimately lead to her downfall – and Quentin warns Versh not to do so – likewise, a sign of its excess. protection of his sister, which is shown when he slaps her for taking off her dress. Ultimately, it is also this overprotection that will lead to his downfall, that is to say his suicide. But since they are all children at this time, and we witness it even through the eyes of Benjy, who is not constrained by time and by the conceptions of ordinary morality, we do not realize it until much later, when we reconsider this passage detailing the siblings' interaction, that the seeds of their destruction were planted from the beginning. While the final section of the novel is told from a third-person omniscient point of view, the non-chronological order of the first three sections must be arranged in such order by that same omniscience, because it gives the story a pace at which we move from disorder to order in the same way that we move in a more conventional narrative from conflict to resolution, and so, although this is not made explicit on a purely narrative level, the novel is nevertheless imbued with 'an overwhelming feeling of fatalism. This inevitability then gives rise to an equal feeling of despair, which in turn gives rise to the essence of tragedy: judging by the progression of the novel's disorder towards order, we know that the end of the legacy of the Compson family is imminent. in sight, and that it is not at all pleasant. “I see the beginning, and now I see the end,” Dilsey said grimly. This inevitability is caused by the arrangement and structuring of the four sections of the novel: even if the narrative progression is not represented in chronological order, the thematic progression certainly is. With the central theme of the novel being an exploration of the constraints of time, there is a progression in movement from a completely disorganized and random perception of time in Benjy's section, to a more ordered but still confused perception of time in the section by Quentin. , to a largely ordered and only occasionally disrupted perception of time in Jason's section, and finally to an extremely ordered and undisturbed representation of time in the final section. It's almost as if we have a "God's view" of the narrative, beginning in Benjy's mind and slowly moving back to reveal an increasingly objective portrait of the Compsons and, most notably, the absent Caddy. This suggests design by means of a seemingly random but essentially logical arrangement of narrative structure in such a way as to ensure that the true subject of the story - Caddy Compson - always remains at the forefront.heart of the story, as a central point. Nowhere in the story is this sense of inevitability more powerful than in Quentin's section of June 2, 1910. More than any other section, Quentin's section functions in the same way as the novel as a whole, but on a microcosmic level - it uses the same structure as the entire novel, but condenses that structure into a single chapter. From the moment we realize that Quentin is the narrator of this section, with the resentful words "[Jesus] didn't have a sister" - which imply a kind of overprotectiveness towards a sister, like the one we have already witnessed in Benjy's section - we suspect the end of his story: by his suicide. We do not receive confirmation of this, however, unless we piece together what we already know, because there is a technique at work here, as follows. Roskus doesn't mention Quentin's name in Benjy's section when he tells Dilsey that "It's not the sign of [bad luck] that people have seen here for fifteen years now" - but nonetheless, there has the implication of a terrible event in the Compson household. this happened about fifteen years ago. Plus, there's the implication that someone is dead - "Dying isn't everything," says Roskus - and there's also the implication (via the symbolic death cry of the "squinch owl") that more bad luck is yet to come. The sense of design is evident when Benjy's story is immediately followed by Quentin's story, dated "June 2, 1910" a little over fifteen years before the events preceding Benjy's section on "April 7, 1928" . So we know, from Roskus's earlier comments, that something of great resonance is happening in this chapter, and, after several paragraphs, we know that whatever it is, it's happening to Quentin. Indeed, when Quentin remembers how he held Caddy at knifepoint and told her he could kill her and then commit suicide, we realize that is exactly what he will do , because Caddy has lost her virginity and thus the idealized version of her that Quentin once held dear to him is now "dead" - gone forever: therefore, all that is left for him to do is commit suicide, as he promised earlier. But mere foreshadowing is not the mere clever end goal of the novel's conception; this is simply the purpose of this section of the novel to emphasize the overarching theme of the story, time. The sluglines at the beginning of each section indicate a specific but overall confusing time frame, and, being conditioned to more conventionally structured works of fiction, we immediately attempt to impose this narrative on a more solid time frame in our eyes. With our failure in Benjy's section, we realize that he exists in a world free from the constraints of time, and with our ability to do so in Quentin's section, we realize that he exists in a world trapped by the constraints time. This comparison and contrast between two series of two of the three brothers, whose respective sections immediately precede or follow that of another - that is, between Benjy and Quentin and between Quentin and Jason - give the novel its meaning overall design, which then impacts and shapes its central theme. The purpose of designing the novel as a whole – as opposed to any single section of the novel – is to paint a portrait of an individual who exists outside of time; not Benjy, who naturally exists outside of time, nor Quentin, who forces himself to exist outside of time, nor Jason, who lives in the past and exists outside of present time, but it is rather a portrait of Caddy, not in as a girl but as an ideal which, by its very nature as something purelymetaphysics, must exist outside of time. But this ideal can only exist outside of time if exactly the same idealized version of Caddy is held by the three brothers, without differences of opinion on their perception of this ideal. For the first two brothers, this is embodied in the notion of castration. Benjy is castrated because, it is implied, he attempts to rape a girl – not a specific girl, but an anonymous girl; yet he knows he has lost something, and the loss he feels is likened to the feeling of loss he felt when he first saw Caddy after she lost her virginity. Similarly, after Caddy loses her virginity, Quentin tells his father that he would like to be a eunuch so he doesn't think about sex (i.e. with his sister). Consider also that in Quentin's section of the novel, Benjy pulls on Caddy's dress when he senses that she is no longer a virgin while, in Benjy's section of the novel, Quentin urges Caddy to keep her dress while she climbs the tree - a symbol of temptation whose scent torments Quentin. It is only through this contrast between the two brothers that Caddy can be presented as an ideal: Benjy has lost something he did not want to lose, Quentin wishes to lose something he did not want to have, but both brothers lost an idealized version of their lives. their beloved sister and it is a completely unintentional loss that neither of them can recover. Caddy could easily have been seen as an ideal by each of the brothers, but she could not have been seen as the same type of ideal by both brothers unless this specific design and structure was used to separate their stories, to plant seeds in one story that are sown in the other, to compare and contrast in order to salvage the overall portrait of the girl and her idealized self. This comparison and contrast between the two brothers reaches its climax in the third part of the novel, narrated by Jason. Jason is a combination of both brothers – like Quentin, he is emotionally dead, although physically animated; like Benjy, he's lost a lot of things, but he's desperately trying to get something back, anything. We would not understand this connection between the three brothers without the specific design of the compare/contrast structure imposed on the narrative, which gradually moves us away from Benjy's entirely subjective perspective and toward Benjy's largely objective perspective. Jason. How is it then that Jason is capable of having exactly the same type of idealized version of Caddy in his mind, as Benjy and Quentin believe, if he doesn't perceive her as an object of desire, as they do . ? Perhaps this is because neither Benjy nor Quentin actually perceive her as an object of desire, but rather the three brothers view their sister as someone they have idealized as a person who, in her absence, provokes a feeling of loss and which, in its absence, causes a feeling of loss. his presence, is capable of canceling this loss. Neither Benjy, Quentin nor Jason specifically want Caddy back, at least not as an individual person; but they just want Caddy back because when she lost her virginity, when she left a child behind, and when she left completely, she took something away from each of the brothers' lives - and that is this something they each seek to reclaim. Caddy is simply the embodiment of that something; it is the common element of loss that cannot be recovered; this is why it becomes, for each of them, an unattainable ideal. Keep in mind: this is just a sample. Get a personalized article now from our expert editors. Get a.