The Sound and the Fury Character Analysis Paper

William Faulkner’s Hidden Main Character in The Sound and the Fury

When the topic of whom the main character is in The Sound and the Fury, many Faulkner scholars agree that Candace Compson is the main character. How she becomes the main character is not quite certain because she is never given a voice. Many are certain that, because of a mental picture Faulkner describes in an interview, Candace is the main character without question. A few scholars believe that she is not the main character but only the topic on which the main characters can respond to and this is why the novel is written from different perspectives. Although we never see events through Candace Compson’s eyes throughout William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury, the mental picture Faulkner has described as the inspiration for this novel show how Caddy is the influence behind all the characters and the leader of her brothers.

In an interview with Jean Stein vanden Heuvel, Faulkner talks about a mental picture he saw. The picture was of a little girl up in a tree, her drawers all covered in mud, spying in through a window. Inside the window she could see her grandmother’s funeral taking place and in turn told her brothers on the ground what she was seeing.  Once Faulkner had this image set in his mind, he realized that what he had planned to be a short story was going to have to be much longer. After he explained who the characters were, why they were there, the significance of being there, and why they were all muddy it was clear this was going to be a larger project. (233)Now realizing the significance and symbolism of the book, another image came to his mind, one that Faulkner says replaces the other picture, one that was of a “fatherless and motherless girl climbing … to escape from the only home she had, where she was never offered love”(233).  

        Now that Faulkner knew what he was talking about, he needed someone whose perspective he could tell the story through, one that would reveal the significance of the girl in the tree and the boys on the ground. He starts to tell it through the eyes of a mentally challenged boy who has no ability to comprehend any sense of time. The boy, Benjy, is the younger brother of Candace, who throughout the novel is called Caddy, except by her mother. Faulkner used Benjy’s disability to tell the story through the eyes of someone who was not able to understand why something was happening, just that is happened, thus giving the reader a sense that this Caddy girl who the center of the world.

His world is wrapped around Caddy. Olga Vickery, in her book The Novels of William Faulkner, talks about how, in Benjy’s structured and ordered world, Caddy has both the ability to maintain the order that is needed for him, but at the same time, she is the instrument for its destruction. She says that “what Benjy most expects of Caddy is the one thing she cannot give him” (35), because she is essentially in time, where Benjy is not. Benjy needs someone who can stay the same and not be affected by time because in his world he does not understand he is any different from when he was 5 to the present day, his 33rd birthday. Caddy, who is in time and, like any normal person understands that throughout time things change, cannot give Benjy her whole future. She is not able to do the same thing every day to ensure the order in Benjy’s life does not alter, but she tries. In one of Benjy’s flashbacks, he finds Caddy wearing perfume and goes into a panic. He has always associated the smell of trees to Caddy and when she smells different his world is momentarily in chaos. She immediately understands what is wrong and how to fix it. She washes off the perfume and has Benjy give the bottle to Dilsey. (42)