eighteen.
Caddy walks quickly past the door where mother, father, and Benjy are.
Mother calls her in, and she comes to the door. She glances at Benjy, then
glances away. He begins to cry. He goes to her and pulls at her dress,
crying. She is against the wall, and she starts to cry. He chases her up
the stairs, crying. She stops with her back against the wall, crying, and
looks at him with her hand on her mouth. Benjy pushes her into the
bathroom.
Caddy's wedding, 1910: Benjy is fifteen years old and Caddy is nineteen.
Benjy, Quentin, and T. P. are outside the barn, and T. P. has given Benjy
some sarsaparilla to drink; they are both drunk. Quentin pushes T. P. into
the pig trough. They fight, and T. P. pushes Benjy into the trough. Quentin
beats T. P., who can't stop laughing. He keeps saying "whooey!". Versh
comes and yells at T. P. Quentin gives Benjy some more sarsaparilla to
drink, and he cries. T. P. takes him to the cellar, and then goes to a tree
outside the parlor. T. P. drinks some more. He gets a box for Benjy to
stand on so he can see into the parlor. Through the window, Benjy can see
Caddy in her wedding veil, and he cries out, trying to call to her. T. P.
tries to quiet him. Benjy falls down and hits his head on the box. T. P.
drags him to the cellar to get more sarsaparilla, and they fall down the
stairs into the cellar. They climb up the stairs and fall against the fence
and the box. Benjy is crying loudly, and Caddy comes running. Quentin also
comes and begins kicking T. P. Caddy hugs Benjy, but she doesn't smell like
trees any more, and Benjy begins to cry.
Benjy at the gate crying, 1910.
Benjy is in the house looking at the gate and crying, and T. P. tells him
that no matter how hard he cries, Caddy is not coming back.
Later, Benjy stands at the gate crying, and watches some schoolgirls pass
by with their satchels. Benjy howls at them, trying to speak, and they run
by. Benjy runs along the inside of the fence next to them to the end of his
yard. T. P. comes to get him and scolds him for scaring the girls.
Quentin's death, 1910.
Benjy is lying in T. P.'s bed at the servants' quarters, where T. P. is
throwing sticks into a fire. Dilsey and Roskus discuss Quentin's death
without mentioning his name or Caddy's name. Roskus talks about the curse
on the family, saying "aint the sign of it laying right there on that bed.
Aint the sign of it been here for folks to see fifteen years now" (29).
Dilsey tells him to be quiet, but he continues, saying that there have been
two signs now (Benjy's retardation and Quentin's death), and that there
would be one more. Dilsey warns him not to mention Caddy's name. He replies
that "they aint no luck on this place" (29). Dilsey tucks Benjy into T.
P.'s bed and pulls the covers up.
Benjy attacks a girl outside the gate and is castrated, 1911: Benjy is
sixteen years old.
Benjy is standing at the gate crying, and the schoolgirls come by. They
tell each other that he just runs along the inside of the fence and can't
catch them. He unlatches the gate and chases them, trying to talk to them.
They scream and run away. He catches one girl and tries to talk to her,
perhaps tries to rape her.
Later, father talks about how angry Mr. Burgess (her father) is, and wants
to know how Benjy got outside the gate. Jason says that he bets father will
have to send Benjy to the asylum in Jackson now, and father tells him to
hush.
Mr. Compson's death, 1912: Benjy is seventeen.
Benjy wakes up and T. P. brings him into the kitchen where Dilsey is
singing. She stops singing when Benjy begins to cry. She tells T. P. to
take him outside, and they go to the branch and down by the barn. Roskus is
in the barn milking a cow, and he tells T. P. to finish milking for him
because he can't use his right hand any more. He says again that there is
no luck on this place.
Later that day, Dilsey tells T. P. to take Benjy and the baby girl Quentin
down to the servants' quarters to play with Luster, who is still a child.
Frony scolds Benjy for taking a toy away from Quentin, and brings them up
to the barn. Roskus is watching T. P. milk a cow.
Later, T. P. and Benjy are down by the ditch where Nancy's bones are. Benjy
can smell father's death. T. P. takes Benjy and Quentin to his house, where
Roskus is sitting next to the fire. He says "that's three, thank the Lawd .
. . I told you two years ago. They aint no luck on this place" (31). He
comments on the bad luck of never mentioning a child's mother's name and
bringing up a child never to know its mother. Dilsey shushes him, asking
him if he wants to make Benjy cry again. Dilsey puts him to bed in Luster's
bed, laying a piece of wood between him and Luster.
Mr. Compson's funeral, 1912.
Benjy and T. P. wait at the corner of the house and watch Mr. Compson's
casket carried by. Benjy can see his father lying there through the glass
in the casket.
Trip to the cemetery, 1912.
Benjy waits for his mother to get into the carriage. She comes out and asks
where Roskus is. Dilsey says that he can't move his arms today, so T. P.
will drive them. Mother says she is afraid to let T. P. drive, but she gets
in the carriage anyway. Mother says that maybe it would be for the best if
she and Benjy were killed in an accident, and Dilsey tells her not to talk
that way. Benjy begins to cry and Dilsey gives him a flower to hold. They
begin to drive, and mother says she is afraid to leave the baby Quentin at
home. She asks T. P. to turn the carriage around. He does, and it tips
precariously but doesn't topple. They return to the house, where Jason is
standing outside with a pencil behind his ear. Mother tells him that they
are going to the cemetery, and he asks her if that was all she came back to
tell him. She says she would feel safer if he came, and he tells her that
Father and Quentin won't hurt her. This makes her cry, and Jason tells her
to stop. Jason tells T. P. to drive, and they take off again.
Roskus's death, later 1920s: Luster is old enough to take care of Benjy by
now.
Dilsey is "moaning" at the servants' quarters. Benjy begins to cry and the
dog begins to howl, and Dilsey stops moaning. Frony tells Luster to take
them down to the barn, but Luster says he won't go down there for fear he
will see Roskus's ghost like he did last night, waving his arms.
Analysis of April 7, 1928:
The title of this novel comes from Shakespeare's Macbeth, Act five, scene
five, in Macbeth's famous speech about the meaninglessness of life. He
states that it is "a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, /
signifying nothing." One could argue that Benjy is the "idiot" referred to
in this speech, for indeed his section seems, at first reading, to "signify
nothing." No one vignette in his narrative seems to be particularly
important, much of it detailing the minutiae of his daily routine. His
speech itself, the "bellering" with which me makes himself heard, does, in
fact, "signify nothing," since he is unable to express himself even when he
wants to in a way other than howling. However, Benjy Compson is not merely
an idiot, and his section is much more meaningful than it first seems.
When discussing Mr. Compson's death, Roskus states that Benjy "know a lot
more than folks thinks" (31), and in fact, for all his idiocy, Benjy does
sense when things are wrong with his self-contained world, especially when
they concern his sister Caddy. Like an animal, Benjy can "smell" when Caddy
has changed; when she wears perfume, he states that she no longer smells
"like trees," and the servants claim that he can smell death. He can also
sense somehow when Caddy has lost her virginity; she has changed to him.
From the time she loses her virginity on, she no longer smells like trees
to him. Although his section at first presents itself as an objective
snapshot of a retarded boy's perceptions of the world, it is more ordered
and more intelligent than that.
Most of the memories Benjy relates in his section have to do with Caddy,
and specifically with moments of loss related to Caddy. The first memory of
Damuddy's death, for example, marks a change in his family structure and a
change in his brother Jason, who was the closest to Damuddy and slept in
her room. His many memories of Caddy are mostly concerned with her
sexuality, a fact that changes her relationship with him and eventually
removes her from his life. His later memories are also associated with some
sort of loss: the loss of his pasture, of his father, and the loss
associated with his castration. Critics have pointed out that Benjy's
narrative is "timeless," that he cannot distinguish between present and
past and therefore relives his memories as they occur to him. If this is
the case, he is caught in a process of constantly regenerating his sister
in memory and losing her simultaneously, of creating and losing at the same
time. His life is a constant cycle of loss and degenerative change.
If Benjy is trapped in a constantly replaying succession of losses, the
objects that he fixates on seem to echo this state. He loves fire, for
instance, and often stares into the "bright shapes" of the fire while the
world revolves around him. The word "fire" is mentioned numerous times in
the memory of his name change. Caddy and the servants know that he stops
crying when he looks at the fire, which is the reason in the present day
that Luster makes a fire in the library even though one is not needed.
The fire is a symbolic object; it is conventionally associated with the
contrast between light and dark, heat and cold. It is a comfort, not merely
to Benjy because of the pleasure he receives in watching it, but because it
is associated with the hearth, the center of the home. As critics have
pointed out, it is often Caddy who places Benjy in front of the fire: "she
led me to the fire and I looked at the bright, smooth shapes" (64). The
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