American Literature books summary

he will sleep in Uncle Maury's room. Uncle Maury has a black eye and a

swollen mouth, and Father says that he is going to shoot Mr. Patterson.

Mother scolds him and father apologizes. He is drunk.

Dilsey puts Benjy to bed alone, but he cries, and Dilsey comes back. Then

Caddy comes in and lies in the bed with him. She smells like trees. Dilsey

says she will leave the light on in Caddy's room so she can go back there

after Benjy has fallen asleep.

Caddy loses her virginity, 1909: Benjy is fourteen years old and Caddy is

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

fire is therefore tied in Benjy's mind with the idea of Caddy; both are

warm and comforting forces within a cold family. But unlike Caddy, the fire

is unchanging; there will always be a fire, even after she leaves him. The

fact that Benjy burns himself on the kitchen stove after Luster closes the

oven door reveals the pain - both physical and mental - that Benjy

associates with Caddy's absence.

Another object that provides comfort to Benjy is the library mirror. Like

the fire, the mirror plays a large part in the memory of his name change,

as Benjy watches the various members of his family move in and out of the

mirror: "Caddy and Jason were fighting in the mirror . we could see Caddy

fighting in the mirror and Father put me down and went into the mirror and

fought too . He rolled into the corner, out of the mirror. Father brought

Caddy to the fire. They were all out of the mirror" (64-65). The mirror is

a frame of reference through which Benjy sees the world; people are either

in or out of the mirror, and he does not understand the concept of

reflection. Like the mirror, Benjy's section of the book provides readers

with a similar exact reflection of the world that Benjy sees, framed by his

memories. Characters slide in and out of the mirror of his perception,

their conversations and actions accurately reported but somewhat distorted

in the process.

As the "tale told by an idiot," Benjy's section makes up the center kernel

of the story of the Compson family tragedy. And the scene of Damuddy's

death in many ways makes up the center around which this section and the

entire story revolve. Faulkner has said that the story grew out of the

image of a little girl's muddy drawers as she climbs a tree to look into

the parlor windows at the funeral taking place. From this image a story

evolved, a story "without plot, of some children being sent away from the

house during the grandmother's funeral. There were too young to be told

what was going on and they saw things only incidentally to the childish

games they were playing" (Millgate, 96). This original story was entitled

"Twilight," and the story grew into a novel because Faulkner fell in love

with the character of this little girl to such an extent that he strove to

tell her story from four different viewpoints.

If this one scene is the center of the story, it is also a microcosm of the

events to follow. The interactions of the children in this scene prefigure

their relations in the future and in fact the entire future of the Compson

family. Thus Caddy's soaking her dress in the water of the branch is a

metaphor for the sexual fall that will torment Quentin and ruin the family:

She was wet. We were playing in the branch and Caddy squatted down and got

her dress wet and Versh said, "Your mommer going to whip you for getting

your dress wet."

"It's not wet." Caddy said. She stood up in the water and looked at her

dress. "I'll take it off." she said. "Then it'll be dry."

"I bet you won't." Quentin said.

"I bet I will." Caddy said.

"I bet you better not." Quentin said.

"You just take your dress off," Quentin said. Caddy took her dress off and

threw it on the bank. Then she didn't have on anything but her bodice and

drawers, and Quentin slapped her and she slipped and fell down in the water

(17-18).

Caddy sullies her garments in an act that prefigures her later sexuality.

She then takes off her dress, a further sexual metaphor, causing Quentin to

become enraged and slap her. Just as the loss of her virginity upsets

Quentin to the point of suicide, his angry and embarrassed reaction to

taking off her dress here reveals the jealous protectiveness he feels for

her sexuality. Benjy, too, is traumatized by the muddying of Caddy's dress:

"Caddy was all wet and muddy behind, and I started to cry and she came and

squatted in the water" (19). Just as her sexuality will cause his world to

crack later on, her muddy dress here causes him to cry.

Jason, too, is a miniature version of what he will become in this scene.

While Caddy and Quentin fight in the branch, Jason stands "by himself

further down the branch," prefiguring the isolation from the rest of his

family that will characterize his later existence (19). Although the other

children ask him not to tell their father that they have been playing in

the branch, the first thing he does when he sees father is tattle. He is as

perverse and mean here as he is sadistic in the third section of the book.

His reaction to Damuddy's death, too, is a miniature for the way he will

deal with the loss that he sees in Caddy's betrayal of the family later on:

"Do you think the buzzards are going to undress Damuddy." Caddy said.

"You're crazy."

"You're a skizzard." Jason said. He began to cry.

"You're a knobnot." Caddy said. Jason cried. His hands were in his pockets.

"Jason going to be rich man." Versh said. "He holding his money all the

time" (35-36).

Here Jason cries over the loss of Damuddy with his hands in his pockets,

"holding his money," just as later he will sublimate his anger at Caddy's

absence by becoming a miserly workaholic and embezzling thousands of

dollars from Quentin and his mother.

The scene ends with the image of Caddy's muddy drawers as she climbs the

tree: "We watched the muddy bottom of her drawers. Then we couldn't see

her. We could hear the tree thrashing . . . . the tree quit thrashing. We

looked up into the still branches" (39). This image of Caddy's muddy

undergarments disappearing into the branches of the tree, the scene that

prompted Faulkner to write the entire novel, is, as critic John T. Matthews

points out, an image of Caddy disappearing, just as she will disappear from

the lives of her three brothers:

What the novel has made, it has also lost . . . . [Caddy] is memorable

precisely because she inhabits the memories of her brothers and the novel,

and memory for Faulkner never transcends the sense of loss . . . . Caught

in Faulkner's mind as she climbs out of the book, Caddy is the figure that

the novel is written to lose (Matthews, 2-3). Thus the seminal scene in

this section of the story is that of the sullied Caddy, "climbing out of"

Benjy's life.

The scene of Damuddy's death is not the only part of this section that

forecasts the future. Like a Greek tragedy, this section is imbued with a

sense of impending disaster, and in fact the events of the present day

chronicle a family that has fallen into decay. For Benjy, the dissolution

of the life he knows is wrapped up in Caddy and her sexuality, which

eventually leads her to desert him. For his mother and the servants, the

family's demise is a fate that cannot be avoided, of which Benjy's idiocy

and Quentin's death are signs. This is what prompts Roskus to repeatedly

vow that "they aint no luck on this place," and what causes mother to

perform the almost ritualistic ablution of changing Benjy's name. It is as

if changing his name from Maury, the name of a Bascomb, will somehow avert

the disastrous fate that the Compson blood seems to bring. This

overwhelming sense of an inescapable family curse will resurface many times

throughout the book.

Summary of June Second, 1910:

This section of the book details the events of the day of Quentin's

suicide, from the moment he wakes in the morning until he leaves his room

that night, headed to the river to drown himself. Like Benjy's section,

this section is narrated in stream of consciousness, sliding constantly

between modern-day events and memories; however, Quentin's section is not

as disjointed at Benjy's, regardless of his agitated mental state. As with

Benjy, most of the memories he relates are centered on Caddy and her

precocious sexuality.

The present day:

Quentin wakes in his Harvard dorm room to the sound of his watch ticking:

"when the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtain it was between seven

and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch" (76).

This is the watch his father gave him when he came to Harvard. He tries to

ignore the sound, but the more he tries, the louder it seems. He turns the

watch over and returns to bed, but the ticking goes on. His roommate Shreve

appears in the doorway and asks him if he is going to chapel, then runs out

the door to avoid being late himself. Quentin watches his friends running

to chapel out the window of his dorm room, then listens to the school's

bell chiming the hour (8:00 a.m.).

He goes to the dresser and picks up his watch, tapping it against the side

of the dresser to break the glass. He twists the hands of the watch off,

but the watch keeps ticking. He notices that he cut himself in the process

and meticulously cleans his wound with iodine. He painstakingly packs up

all his clothes except two suits, two pairs of shoes, and two hats, then

locks his trunk and piles his schoolbooks on the sitting-room table, as the

quarter-hour bell chimes.

He bathes and puts on a new suit and his (now broken) watch, puts his trunk

key into an envelope addressed to his father, then writes two noes and

seals them. He goes out the door, bumping into his returning roommate on

the way, who asks him why he is all dressed up. The half-hour chimes and

Quentin walks into Harvard Square, to the post office. He buys stamps and

mails one letter to his father and keeps one for Shreve in his coat pocket.

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