Quentin Compson: Self-Portrait of a Young Artist's Emotions

Abstract

The Sound and the Fury is the most personal of Faulkner's novels. No other work engaged him for so long with such intensity. It was written, as the author has stated, out of anguisha dream that haunted its dreamer for nearly two decades. A story that is retold five times and yet never told to the author's satisfaction appears very much like ritual, a spell to banish evil spirits.' And just as Hemingway's Big Two-Hearted River (the story which Malcolm Cowley discovered as a spell) is about one thing, while seeming to be about another, so too The Sound and the Fury appears to be about the decline of the Compsons, when in fact this decline of family is but the haunted vision projected out of the anguish of the novel's central character. The haunted dreamer is Quentin Compson, the oldest son and heir. Sensitive and suffering, he becomes the central moral agent in the novel and bears the burden of the author's anguish. To this end, Faulkner endows him with the equipment of the artist the awareness, imagination, conscience, and civilized burden so that Quentin comes to represent both the modern artist in general and also, in many revealing ways, the agony of Faulkner in particular.