Kartiganer on Faulkner's Form

Donald Kartiganer, in the journal English Literary History, describes Faulkner’s style in a very interesting way. He explains that Faulkner uses the experiences of various characters to create a broader idea of an event. His form can be summarized as “not the sequence of bizarre incidents happening to a single hero, but the sequence of bizarre characters happening to a single incident.” The reader never sees that incident fully described, but can take the various fragments and reassemble them to gain a surprisingly deep understanding of that event.

I think that this is very much true in The Sound and the Fury with regard to the night that Caddy loses her virginity. We see it from Benjy’s point of view, Caddy’s words, and Quentin’s point of view. We never quite have the whole story given to us at once, but there are very clear descriptions available if you can manage to recognize each one and integrate them all properly. The novel, explains Kartiganer, therefore becomes an attempt “to become a single stream of [its] alienated parts.”

Kartiganer also notes that each of the four sections appears to be “locked within itself – interpenetration at an absolute minimum…” However, I believe that (based on what I have read as of today) there is actually a great deal of interpenetration between sections. The very fact that various sections contain memories of the same events is sufficient to show their obvious interconnectedness. I also believe, as Kartiganer unsatisfactorily refutes, that Caddy acts as a unifying force in the novel. Caddy is central to the narrative within multiple sections of the novel, even if that centrality is due to the narrator’s personal connection with her. Nevertheless, I do agree that each of the narrators seems unable to look beyond “the confines of his own private vision.” The narrators do display only their own perspectives and cannot see beyond themselves.

Another interesting point that Kartiganer makes is that the confusing aspect of Benjy’s section is that it “is not too jumbled but too clear,” in the way that characters are described. There is no complexity to the personalities of each character. Essentially, the characterizations are much too simple. After all, Benjy does not elaborate or color his memories, but we still get very specific ideas of what each character is like. If Benjy’s memories were really of characters as complex as those in real life, we would likely be unable to tell anything about any one of them because each character would have some moments of kindness or generosity and some moments of anger. Kartiganer summarizes the deceptively clear-cut characterizations as: “Caddy is love… while Quentin is sullenness and impotent anger… Jason is evil incarnate, and father is the occasional surrogate for Caddy’s verdant smell.” In this way Kartiganer exposes the overly- definite descriptions in Benjy’s section.
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Source Citation:
“The Sound and the Fury and Faulkner’s Quest for Form”
Author: Donald M. Kartiganer
Source: ELH, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Dec. 1970), pp. 613 – 639
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2872385
Accessed 22/10/2008 16:27