“I'm Stronger than You”

Abstract

William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury documents Quentin Compson's descent into suicidal despair over his failure to realize in his own lived experience the patriarchal American South's normative imperatives of white male authority into which he is being initiated. Conflicts play out in several social arenas, as Quentin tries to regulate his experience with his mother's coldness, his sister's teenaged sexual exploits and subsequent pregnancy, as well as his incapacity to establish for himself a secure position of power among his physically and psychologically stronger peers. Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir's analysis of male power and gender relations in The Second Sex, and her use of Hegel's theory of subject-object interdependence in particular, the article seeks to shed light on the marked disequilibrium between expectation and disinheritance, to which Quentin's response is suicide, that is, a total relinquishment of identity.