#caddy compson

In our final literature circle for William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, we discussed the ending of the book, and we all agreed that we were disappointed with the abrupt way that the story finished. We all felt that there was going to be a bigger climax, so we were all a little bit taken aback by the sudden, “ordinary” ending. After going a bit deeper as to why Faulkner would have finished his novel in such a way, we realized that he was trying to show us that life doesn’t work as most books want us to think. Sometimes there is no “big event” that changes, or resolves everything; life goes on no matter what. This is what the modern writers really wanted us to grasp; books like The Sound and the Fury give us only a snippet of the lives of the characters, and most of the time, the story line will be disappointing. We realized that Faulkner was trying to tell us that life is disappointing, and it can’t wait for people to come back, or for something drastic to happen. Another reason why the author might have not brought Caddy back in the end is because he wanted his readers to feel how the characters in the book felt, especially Benjy. We all agreed that we were so eagerly expecting her to come back and explain herself, but she never did, and this is how Benjy felt like his whole life after she left him. He is described waiting at the gate every day hoping that she would return, and we are able to see the agony he lives with every time he is reminded of her because he misses her dearly. Faulkner wanted to keep us waiting because that is what the characters were doing as well, and he wanted us to feel what they were feeling. This applies especially for Benjy’s situation, but it also can apply for Jason, who I’m sure wanted Caddy to come back and apologize to him for what she did, and for Miss Quentin, who really wants to have a real relationship with her mother. 

I shared my idea about how Caddy might be the fire represented on the cover page of the novel, and the group agreed that this is a very plausible answer. We looked at the ways that she is a warm character (especially to Benjy), a very lively one (we see that in the way that she is daring and not afraid to take risks), but she is, in many ways, very destructive in the Compson family. We all thought that the fire would be something physical, that when the fire would actually appear in the story, things would start becoming very interesting, but we took little consideration to the possibility that maybe the fire is just a metaphor and that this fire was present throughout the whole novel. We were playing around with the idea that maybe Caddy is the “tragedy” that is so clearly mentioned in the description on the back of the book. Figuring out what this tragedy was was kind of our mission throughout the whole time we were reading, but we realized that it isn’t as clear as we thought. 

We also all agreed that we loved Dilsey as a character because she is such a strong woman in a time where women, especially black women, were not highly esteemed.We appreciated Faulkner even more for creating this character; I don’t know how many people would have made a character like hers in the time period that they were in. We thought it was interesting to hear a black servant’s voice because we so rarely do know exactly how they lived during this time period. 

Although we were disappointed with Caddy’s not coming back we found it kind of neat that the last portion of the book was written in the third person, because it gave us an outside perspective on things. Throughout the whole novel, we were always experiencing the things going on in the story through somebody else’s mind, so we were limited in the sense that we could only go as far as the first-person narrator’s opinion about everything. With a third-person narrative, we could look at things objectively, and see them for what they truly were, instead of having to rely on a character’s perception of things. 

Why did Faulkner decide to write the final chapter of the novel in the third person, instead of in the point of view of the final Compson child, Caddy?