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A Tale Told By An Idiot-Full Of Sound And Fury

1246 Words5 Pages

Olivia Tse
Professor Jessica Fisher
English 122
November 25, 2015
[Title]: [Subtitle] “A tale told by an idiot / full of sound and fury” is the Shakespearean line that Faulkner claims inspired the first part of The Sound and the Fury. Indeed, the section is told by a speechless idiot, plagued by mental illness and unable to articulate beyond slobbering, moaning and bellowing. Renamed once it became apparent that he was mentally unsound so as not to bring further shame upon Mrs. Compson’s family name, Benjamin “Benjy” Compson is the butt of jokes by even Faulkner himself, who, in a twist of dark humor, begins the castrated Benjy’s narrative looking for the lost balls of golfers. Benjy is continuously silenced by nearly all the characters who appear in the novel whipped like an animal when he misbehaves. A narrator who violates nearly all the essential qualities of first-person narration, he is unable to comprehend the world as anything but a jumble of unconnected singularities, and as a result we too are in a constant state of disorientation as we follow his account. Benjy’s inability to communicate is contradictory in that it demonstrates his own eloquence in direct opposition …show more content…

In William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Benjy serves as a physical representation of not only the inevitable collapse of the Compson family, but also

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