final thoughts on Faulkner

Faulkner is a genius for making his characters human.

All of them – none of them were monsters, not even Jason. Faulkner showed how Jason has some remnant of allegiance to old ways in looking out for those under him, like his mother and Caddie, although he milked it for all it was worth. He was a coherent character.

But I’m fascinated by the final chapter. The gorgeous lush descriptions of Dilsey iron the image of an old weatherbeaten woman, somehow still strong and beautiful, standing against the beginning and the end that she saw, into the reader’s mind. “Two tears slid down her fallen cheeks, in and out of the myriad coruscations of immolation and abnegation and time,” Faulkner describes, highlighting her role as perhaps the one thing that withstands the test of time and the destruction of the Compson family.

I think the sparseness of Faulkner’s language is gorgeous and lyrical as the best of the Romantics; the sparseness fits the tone of the age – the Modern age – and boils down the essence of man into something actually realistic. Granted, Faulkner’s tales aren’t exactly hopeful—why didn’t he believe the truth of the sermon WHICH HE WROTE?!—but still somehow, when shorn of all the extraneous superfluity—the words which one cannot stand—then the bones are there—and the bones are sound.

What I mean is, boil a man down to his essence and you’ll see God; God is inescapable. God is inescapable in the love shown in Dilsey’s care for Benjy—inescapable in the love of Benjy for Caddie—even inescapable in the hopeless metaphysical meanderings of Quentin, poor, lost man. I have this theory that man defines himself either in agreement with or in opposition to God (and sometimes – a lot of times – both at once). Regardless, God is there. The Sound and the Fury exemplifies that.

Mary Sue Daoud, senior, Fall 2012