The Destruction of a Family

The final section of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury brings the story full circle with a closing in which the Compson family has finally destroyed itself. The novel focuses on the decline and destruction of the family as carried out by the individual family members: by the final section Quentin (number one) committed suicide; Father drank himself to death; Caddy tarnished the family pride and drove a wedge into the family’s inner relationships; Roskus passed away; and T.P., Versh, and Froney presumably moved on to greater things in their lives. The remaining characters all find their own end on Easter Sunday, 1928: Mother resigns to her bedroom where she presumably gives up her life; Quentin (number two) runs away from home; Jason has his hoarded money, which is perhaps most prized possession, stolen from him and is humiliated by his inability to retrieve it; Luster is beaten down by Jason; Benjy is left with a flower, symbolic of a peaceful state, that has been broken; and Dilsey, the true matriarch of the family, experiences the saving power of Christ through the visiting preacher. Every family member and servant has either died or moved on from the family’s ‘curse,’ thereby completing the effect of that curse and completing the decline of the family. The portrayed order at the end of the novel is therefore the calm-after-the-storm tranquility and serenity that is left in the vacuum of the family’s final collapse. (241)