Word: compsons
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...William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury a religious novel? Faulkner himself was a somewhat cynical agnostic, and few readers would find much spiritual comfort in his dour chronicle of the Compson family. But to Professor Nathan Scott of the University of Chicago Divinity School, the answer is clearly yes. Behind the novel's secular fa?ade, he argues, lies a poetic expression of what theology calls kairos-the divine gift of time span in which man exists on earth...
...aimlessness, moral impotence and sense of doom that he saw afflicting many of the old established Southern families in the first third of this century. The events are simple enough, though the stream-of-consciousness telling makes them often difficult to follow. Of the four children in the aristocratic Compson family, the boy Benjy is an idiot, the girl Caddy gets pregnant, marries the wrong man, and goes away, the boy Quentin commits suicide in an inflexible rejection of his sister's dishonor, and the boy Jason grows into a man constantly lashing himself with hate, frustration and repressed...
Agonized Search. All of these novels have a jolting brilliance and precision of characterization. Jason Compson, bitter, narrow and enraged by personal failings, is a merciless rendering of the type of Southerner who constantly vents his frustration with lines such as "What this country needs is white labor. Let these damn trifling niggers starve for a couple of years, then they'd see what a soft thing they have." Negro Novelist Ralph Ellison says that the enduring Dilsey Gibson reminds him of the real-life Rosa Parks, who touched off the Birmingham, Ala., bus boycott...
...gunfighter in the manner of Wild Bill Hickok, was more than a ready-made fictional hero: he was an embodiment of aristocratic tradition. As it happened, successive Falkners had successively less gumption. Novelist William, fourth in line, had in his father and grandfather suggestions of the thinning Sartoris and Compson clans-weak and neurotic aristocrats who let slip inherited wealth and inherited tradition...
...Harvard, Quentin Compson finds his ideal world of the past threatened not only by some rather obnoxious characters who glare rather frighteningly at him out of the present, but also by the irrefutable fact, manifested in the dissolute life of his sister Caddy, that the ideal past never existed not ever could again. In his inability to face the world in its frightening reality, Quentin loses the will to live. His death by drowning in the Charles River on June 2, 1910 perhaps reflects Faulkner's own deepest feelings about man and his problems. Even Dilsey, perhaps, is not more...