Technique and Story Telling

Faulkner’s use of the stream of consciousness technique enhanced the telling of the Compson family’s tragic tale. The narrating (if steam of consciousness is considered “narrating”) of the family’s destruction is presented through multiple perspectives and through the broken flow of thoughts. The disjointed story telling mirrors the disjointed Compson family. Faulkner forces us to be literary detectives and piece together the fragments of the family puzzle. Faulkner keeps us engaged by planting clues in our scavenger hunt. Through the process of collecting ideas, deciphering clues, and completing the jigsaw puzzle that is The Sound and the Fury, we are given a unique perspective into the family’s demise.

Benjy’s steam of consciousness creates a broken path for the reader to follow. When I started reading the novel my own stream of consciousness kept connecting Benjy to Christopher Boone, the autistic child from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. However, further into the novel I realized Benjy was much harder to understand than Boone. Perhaps because we are inside the mind of Benjy, meaning we experience his thoughts in real time--unlike with Chris Boone. Faulkner’s exploration of the human psyche’s leaping thoughts makes the novel more challenging and consequently more compelling. If the Compson family’s struggle were told as a conventional story, the effect would be completely different. Because we are inside Benjy’s mind, we feel his emotions and experience the story on a personal level—a level that could not be achieved through say an omniscient narrator.

A scene that really demonstrated this emotional connection was when Benjy wanted Caddy to wash herself to rid her of the deeds she’s committed (an allusion to Lady Macbeth of course). Benjy pushes Caddy into the bathroom, but instead of washing, Caddy cowers against the wall. She has just lost her virginity, and therefore cannot wash away this action like she had previously done. The violent scene is dramatic with flowing tears and yelling. Through Benjy’s perspective we see his pain as well as Caddy’s. Faulkner gives us enough of the scene to paint a picture in our mind of what happened. However, this picture is abstract—like splatters of a scene against a murky canvas. The rest of the painting is to be painted in later.

Quentin’s narration on June 2nd, 1910 is another great example of how the technique of steam of consciousness enhances the story. Our understanding of Quentin comes from memory fragments and his consciousness on the day of his suicide. Faulkner gives subtle, but later obvious hints, about Quentin’s strange actions. Quentin’s obsession with time, his packing of clothes, and his writing of letters-to-be-mailed-tomorrow are all clear signs that he has decided to commit suicide. Towards the end of this section, all marks of punctuation, grammatical rules, and even spelling are disregarded. This deterioration of logical sentence formation is indicative of Quentin’s state of mind: that of a suicidal man who no longer cares for trivial things or the rational of grammar.

Overall, Faulkner’s use of steam of consciousness may have been unconventional. However, it proves essential to the telling of the Compson’s tale. The coupling of unique perspectives, broken bits of memory, and interconnected thoughts create a fuzzy mental image of what exactly happened. While there are still two more sections to explore, the readers are well on their way to (hopefully) understanding the complete story. Faulkner keeps us attentive and engaged throughout this process.
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