A Study of Time in Faulkner’s Characters of The Sound and The Fury

Paul Lee 이풍호(청산) 
English 495/Seminar, Fall 1994 W. 6:10-10:00 
Professor Jun Liu (3-5345) 
December 7, 1994 
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A Study of Time in Faulkner’s Characters 
of The Sound and The Fury* 

To understand characterization of William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury (1929), time is the one of the themes we have to consider. The purpose of this paper is to study time which appears in the major characters of the novel. Time has a special meaning to each of the characters: to Benjy, time is always present; to Jason, time is a matter of being on time and living in a routine pattern; to Dilsey, time is not troublesome; to Quentin, time is his enemy; to Mr. Compson, time is what the individual decides it is. 
Time, however, takes its toll on the fortunes of the Compsons. As time goes by, the compsons experience the passing of time. In the early days, Damuddy’s death, the Compsons seem to be a typical aristocratic family. There is a hint that the procession of guests to the funeral is impressive. But by the time that Quentin goes to college, the family is forced to sell and to pay for his education. In 1928, time has eroded the neglected barn, and the family is reduced to Jason’s penny-pinching. In other words, the passing of time is a physical and evil influence. 
According to Jean-Paul Sartre, the real subject of The Sound and The Fury is man’s unfortunate dependency on time. At first, the technique employed by Faulkner seems a negation of temporality (timeness). Faulkner’s characters apparently negate time by measuring the past, not chronologically, but by reconstructing important events. Their past is a matter of emotional relatedness. For Faulkner, the past was never completely forgotten or lost; the present was always threatened by those sudden invasions of the past. The past was an obsession. In Faulkner’s metaphors of time, the past likewise exercises so tremendous a pull on the present that the present can never move toward the future. 
Quentin exemplifies Faulkner’s metaphysics of time; for him there is no future, not even a specious present; reality was and is the past. Quentin is obsessed with time, but Benjy is absolutely unconscious of time. Because he cannot conceive of time, time does not exist for him. He can only experience sensation, and that only if it is momentary and fleeting. Even the present eludes him, since he is unaware of the passing of time; he lives in a past-present world. For a mind such as his, time or timeness does not exist, and so everything happens for him in dramatic terms in the present. And because there is no conscious past for Benjy, in his section, we are given a timeless view of all the Compsons. Benjy’s basic weakness of mind and his absolute lack of a time sense, dislocations of the time sequences in his section are understandable. 
Benjy is virtually living in that timeless state that Quentin tries so hard to reach. The scenes in the past that Benjy remembers are connected with his sister, Caddy. When Luster helps Benjy through the fence in April, 1928, getting snagged on a nail remind him of time twenty-six years earlier when he was snagged on a nail when he was with Caddy (p. 3). Like “Caddy uncaught me and we crawled through,” Faulkner gives us a hint of a time change by explaining part or all of the past scene in italics. He often shifts to roman type for the present activities of the characters as “It’s too cold out there” (p. 4). 
In the Quentin section, more than anything else, Quentin would like to get outside of time, as Benjy has just about done. There is the literary temporary escape--sleep; there is the permanent escape--death. Quentin considers these and several other forms of escape as well. He wants to escape time because he does not wish to give up the intense pain and the guilt that Caddy’s dishonor has given him. He also wants to escape time because, paradoxically, he has decided that one way to get outside of time is to kill himself, and he has set a time for his suicide. But if he can manage in some way to forget time before the appointed hour, everything will be all right. This is the reason for Quentin’s struggle, throughout his section, against finding out what time it is. 
Throughout that fateful day of June 2, 1910, Quentin tries various schemes to forget time. He purposely breaks his watch (p. 51), but the watch keeps on ticking; time keeps on going, giving him no escape from timeness, or that temporary reprieve from the self-determined death that he is so desperately trying to stretch out. He enters a jeweler’s shop, presumably to have the watch fixed, but refuses to leave the watch for repair (p. 53). Instead, he asks the jeweler if any of those watches in the window are right? The jeweler gives him a reassuring answer: none of the watches is correct, because “they haven’t been regulated and set yet (p. 54). Now Quentin knows that watches can lie, that they can measure only apparent, not real, time. Perhaps he may yet get into real time without killing himself. He will try harder to block out mechanical time from his consciousness simply by avoiding clocks, calendars, and so on. 
Quentin’s dilemma arises from his desire to get out of mechanical time and into eternal time in which change and motion are transcended and everything remains in the present like Benjy’s state; but he is not willing to pay the price--death. He keeps thinking of himself as already dead, or that he will soon be dead. He has eliminated the future in his personal eternity of time. As in the case of Benjy’s concept of time, Quentin’s near-insane obsession with time provides Faulkner with the device for commuting between the past and the present, between the years 1899 and 1910, with a great deal of artistic logic. 
For Jason, time is money. He lives completely in the present and denies the past. His value system works only in the present. Jason is also obsessed with time, but in a much different manner and for altogether different motive. However he may rush from place to place to save him, he never quite gets where he wants to get to in time to accomplish any of his desires. Like money, time seems to elude him. He just misses catching his niece who has escaped with his money which is considered as the product of time; he gets to the cotton market just too late to save his investment; he continually complains about the lateness with which the cotton market reports come down from New York (p. 121). His lateness is always self-induced; it is always a product of his almost frantic dashing about. The point Faulkner is making through Jason’s misunderstanding of the nature of time is that modern society rejected real time when it decided to reject the past, and that its prodigal waste of time through a mechanical measurement of time is a prime example of reason applied wiThoUT The TemPeRije ijflUEjce if SEjSaTiij iR--EiiTiij* Ij JaQij, TheReD)Re, Ue haTe The PRime eXamPle of The modeRj peRson uho doeS not understand that time follows the order of the heart. 
Dilsey is neither obsessed with time, as Quentin and Jason are as Benjy is. For her, time is something concrete, something to be used, and also something abstract or eternal. I will consider this “eternal” aspect with Cleanth Brooks’ essay. And because she has grasped the true meaning of time, she can function in any crisis, get things done, and even get to church on time to hear about resurrection, the timelessness of faith, eternal life, eternal time. Because of her, we are able to see the whole Compson family in proper historic prospective, which only a correct time-sense, a proper understanding of the continuation of time, cans give. 
In the critical essay, “Man, Time, and Eternity” of William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha County, it is significant facts to the reader that Cleanth Brooks tells us about the characters’ relationships between time and eternity appearing in The Sound and the Fury: 
Benjy is locked almost completely into a timeless present. He has not 
much more sense of time than an animal does. Quentin’s obsession 
with the past is in fact a repudiation of the future. Caddy’s betrayal of 
the honor and the fact that she is cut off forever from Quentin mean that he possesses no future he is willing to contemplate. Jason, by insisting on seeing time only with regard to something to be done, is incapable of any real living. Jason is so committed to preparation for the future that he is almost as enslaved as are his brothers. 
To Dilsey neither the past nor the future nor the present is oppressive, because to her they are all aspects of eternity, and her ultimate commitment is to eternity. It may be useful therefore to notice how the plight of each of the brothers constitutes a false interpretation of eternity. Benjy lives in a specious eternity: his present does not include all in timelessness--past, present, and future gathered together in a total pattern--but is a purely negative eternity, since it contains no past and no future. Quentin, we may say, wants to take eternity by storm--to reach it by a sort of shortcut, which in effect means freezing into permanence one fleeting moment of the past. Eternity is thus for Quentin not something which fulfills and enfolds all time, but simply a particular segment of time, like one note of music infinitely sustained. Jason is committed neither to a timeless present nor to a frozen past but to a making ready for the truly happy state. Jason’s eternity is the empty mirage of an oasis toward which he is constantly flogging his tired camel and his tired self. (Minter 291-92) 

When he reaches the age of thirty-three, Benjy has lost many things, but in his loss of Caddy he has lost the most precious things of all--love [the past]. His present is a remembrance of things lost--the Compson pasture now a golf course, the graveyard, the fire, Caddy’s white satin slipper and so on. The function of Section I is to allow the past to expose the sterility of the present, and the most strongly symbolic component of the past is Benjy’s childhood. 
Quentin’s world is a separated one. On that fateful day (June 2, 1910), he shuttles back and forth between two sets of events, one past and the other present. But Quentin’s problem arises from his inability to separate his memories of the past from his involvement with the present. Quentin’s flight from reality and substance is further emphasized by references to shadows and mirrors. Benjy also sees Caddy’s wedding reflected in a mirror; but when Quentin sees the reflection, it is as if Caddy runs out of the mirror and out of his world. He has canceled her out of reality. 
Quentin’s emotional difficulties compel him to defy reality, time, and his own physical and intellectual development by remaining a child--the past. Through suicide, he remains a child. Quentin is no tragic hero; he is too weak to resist any of the pressures of reality in a positive, heroic way. He is pathetic in the time of present. 
Jason, the last of the Compsons, is the son who had to stay home instead of going off to Harvard. He is the unstable country-store clerk always threatening to leave his miserable position. But because of his failure, Jason is going mad. He is emotionally disposed against reflection [the past] and self-examination [the present]. 



Works Cited 
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. 2nd ed. Ed. David Minter. New York: W.W. Norton , 1994.

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