What has the Compson family lost?
The Compson family as a whole has lost everything that they once were. They've lost their reputation, their ability to function as a family unit, and their love for one another. In the physical sense, Quentin is gone forever becaues of his death, yet Caddy can also be thought of as "lost" because she's a character who has no indication of coming back. Emotionally, Jason has lost the control he longs to hold on to and Benjy has lost the comfort of farmiliarity that kept him sane.

What is the source of the tension in Dilsey's section?
I think that Dilsey's section is unique above the others because she seems to have very little bias towards any of the characters. She never gives her opinion of each person or tells the reader anything about her own personal judgement. Instead, she uses description to show the reader what is going on in a situation, but keeps enough distance of her own thoughts to make the source of tension minimal.


What is Faulkner asking us to consider here?
Faulkner is asking us to consider the roles of each of the characters in comparison to the others. Quentin is seen

How does Quentin's relationship compare with Benjy's?

Quentin and Benjy are both tragic characters who have flaws that are very apparent to the outside world but invisible to the characters. Other than that sad realization, they are quite different. Benjy has issues understanding the world because he was born with a disability that keeps him from being normal, while Quentin is just an emotional wreck but has the mental compasity to understand time. Thus, when Quentin becomes fixated on time and certin events, its by choice not because he has no other thought process like Benjy.

What is the source of tension between Quentin and "time"?

Quentin's tension with time is that he hates time because with every passing moment something happens that complicates him life even further. He hates the idea of change, especially when it comes to his sister's innocence, which is why he lies and fixates on specific things. Quentin hates that time moves him forward into issues and problems he can't always fix and moments when people don't feel bad for him, so he feels tension with it.


What conclusion can you now draw?

Time has lots of meaning through this book, but the part that I think is most intriguing is that one of hte themes of this book its the Compson's decline or the fact that they are slowly falling apart. Time, to the family, represents the slow movement of their decline and that's a painful process to watch. Like a cancer patient who takes many grueling years to die with failing treatments, the Compsons's feel the pain of their mistakes for a long period of time which is maybe why each kid has such issues with time. I personally thing Quentin lost the will to fight time and that's why he ultimately killed himself.

Why does Quentin kill himself?

As I said before, I think he lost his fight against time and he lost the will to try anymore. Although a bright young man, the pain in his life was too much for him to handle and too great for time to heal. After all, time is a wonderful healing tool but there are some things, like heartbreak (over Caddy's innocence for Quentin), that remains an open wound until the gap can be filled. In Quentin's case, the void was never filled and to him, nothing could lessen the pain of living with it, so he choose to end it.

What do we "learn" about family from Benjy and Quentin?

We learn that the kids of the Compson family are ultimately never changed from the people and events that occurred during their upbringing. Maybe in that sense, Faulkner is making a suggestion about the world in which childhood is a defining factor that shapes the character of people as adults. Then again, childhood is not something people can always control. Benjy and Quentin didn't ask to have an alcoholic father or ill mother, they were just dealt the wrong cards in life and its troubling to think that they were predestined to be who they were due to their parents. So, I guess I haven't made up my mind on this yet.

Benjy's Hypertext (Homework Sept. 10th, 2007)

Assignment- Read through the hypertext version of Benjy's narrative.


Through reading the hypertext of Benjy's thoughts, I was surprised about a few things. I thought the story would read ten times easier, but it didn't seem to make the original version make more sense to me. Again, this all goes back to Benjy's unconventional use of time compared to how I'm used to reading novels. This got me to thinking again about how Benjy felt about time and I remembered a comment Phil Seo said in class about how Benjy remembered major emotional events like his father and Quentin dying. After re-reading the section, I thought of Benjy in a different light. Before, I assumed because of his disability he just remembered random events that had a meaning to him, but perhaps the events he recalls are due to the intense emotion he felt about them. Time and emotion have a strong bond, in my opinion. This bond I think is explained well from a Bible verse from Ecclesiastes. (below)

There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven — A time to give birth, and a time to die; A time to plant, and a time to uproot what is planted. A time to kill, and a time to heal; A time to tear down, and a time to build up. A time to weep, and a time to laugh; A time to mourn, and a time to dance. A time to throw stones, and a time to gather stones; A time to embrace, and a time to shun embracing. A time to search, and a time to give up as lost; A time to keep, and a time to throw away. A time to tear apart, and a time to sew together; A time to be silent, and a time to speak. A time to love, and a time to hate; A time for war, and a time for peace.
King Solomon, The Bible, Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

Like this quote, Benjy relates his thoughts to times that had strong centimental value to him rather than just excitement as I had thought before. I guess I was being very close-minded before about Benjy and I wasn't giving him enough credit for his thought process, thinking it was just about random connections of instances that has similarities instead of events of emotional importance to him.

In terms of the hypertext, I think i prefer the original text because it makes Benjy's character come alive more.

The Sound and the Fury: Benjy (Homework Sept. 10th)

What is the source of tension in Benjy's section?
As I reread this section, i noticed that most of the tension I found as a reader was Benjy's inability to absorb and concentrate on keeping his thoughts chronological. His perception of time is mixed up to a point that its very confusing for the reader to follow what's going on. Another key source of tension for Benjy on a character level is what is his importance to the story if he is considered nothing but an "idoit". I found as I contiuned to read the book that Benjy was essentail to the story because his level of honesty about each of the characters gave an inside look into each of them that they themselves could not do. Benjy becomes the not bias narrator of the story in the beginning, which helps greatly as the plot thickens.


What is Benjy's relationship to time and events?
Benjy doesn't have a relationship to time and events like ordinary people do. For Benjy, time isn't a measure that has a specific right order, rather time is relitive to him. Benjy's thought process is unique in the sense that he thinks about one thing and then instead of thinking about what happens next, he connects his present thought to another moment in time that connects to the present thought regardless of whether its chronological or not. For the reader, this makes things complex but in teh grand scheme of things, I think its a sign that Benjy isn't as dumb as he's thought to be by others. Not to go on a huge random tangent..BUT when they atopsied Albert Einstien they found that he had more connecting neurons in his brain than the average person by a multiple of ten. Einstien didn't do so well in school, but he proved to be brillant with his contribituoins to the world. It was said that the way he learned was by connecting his current studies to something he already knew so that he would remember it more clearly. For example, if he was studying the the capitals as a child he wouldn't have meomorized that Hartford is the capital of Connecticut. Instead he might say Hartford sounds like Harvard College which is in Massachusetts which is next Connecticut, thus Hartford is the capital of Connecticut. Just has Benjy makes random connections to recall events, Einstein used to as well. While this all might seem weird to connect, perhaps benjy's connections that seem out of place, are really just his genius way of thinking. In that sense, maybe Benjy's relationship to time and events doesn't have to be like others, because like many other strangely unique people (Albert Einstein) it works for him!


How does Faulkner utilize: metonymy, antonomasia, metaphor, mimesis, and metaphysics in this section?
Faulkner uses these literary terms in many ways through-out the Benjy's section and in my opinion they help make Benjy's thoughts more clear. Though at times Benjy's train of thought seems to rabble or go off course, his senses are very prominat in his description of things. The part of his section that struck me the most was when Benjy would say "Caddie smelled like trees" of "Caddie smelled like leaves". At first I thought that was just a way of saying how she smelled...but as I came to realize later, it was in fact a way to describe Caddies promisous actions. This metaphor was reoccuring over the section and it developed Benjy's character as showing he knew what was going on though he didn't fully understand the implications of Caddie's actions.

Sept. 4th 2007 "Families"

Question- What you are doing in this post is honing your ideas and thinking about "families". What does one of these statements/or all of them make you think/wonder? This is a free write let yourself wander, but also ground these wanderings in specific ideas. Remember - try and answer for yourself - WHY do you think/believe what you do?

Today in our group we decided not to look at one of the quote specifically but all of them to form different ideas about what we thought was the meaning of family. Ari, Clay, and Becca (my group) discussed how we've all been brought up in typical homes, where our parents are married and we have siblings and pets to fill our house with company. This brought us to the beginning of our pondering. After discussing our own families, we truened to family structures of famous people, sociaital villians to be specific. Hitler, we knew, was brought up in a broken home where his father was much older than his mother and abused his wife and child due to a problem with alcoholism. Voldemort, from Harry Potter, was also the product of a broken home where violence plagued his early childhood. Both real and fictional villians that we discussed had the common thread of being from families that weren't functional or loving. To this point, I think that families have shown in the past and continue to show the beginning of a healthy child. Having loving parent/parents, in my opinon, is a key factor to the success of each individual. The reason i believe this is true is because I've seen, more often than not, that people in real life and novel characters are better people if they have the influence of a good, loving family.

At the end of your post, skip a line and ask a question. For example "blah, blah, blah... What is the relationship between carrying on our family's legacy to finding my own way through life"?

I think this question could be answered a number of ways depending on the time period and the place an individual lives. Carrying on a families legacy means everything to some cultures and very little to others, so the basis for this answer is variable. In my opinon, I think its more important to find you're own way through life than to carry on the family legacy. Family legacy does have its upside, like a safe job and future, but more unfourntatly, it can lack passion and drive. My father works as a brand evaluationist doing work I can't begin to comprehend and my mother is a market researcher with studies that don't interest me. They both adore they're jobs and I too want to enjoy the work i will eventually go into, thus family legacy doesn't carry much weight in my path through life. Therefore, the relationship between the two is relitive to the individual family and the culture they thrieve in.