Sound And The Fury

There are three major themes present in The Sound and the Fury. They are the themes of good versus evil, loss, and love. Throughout the whole novel we can see that "Quentin is striving for the condition of tragedy for the Compsons"(Hoffman 86), while Benjy is doing the opposite. Dowling's opinion on page 114 is that Benjy is seen as a Christ figure. This is evident because he acts like an innocent child due to his handicap. Along with the whole Quentin versus Benjy theme there is a sense of light and dark or good and evil in The Sound and the Fury, according to Mortimer 65.

The theme of loss is present always in The Sound and the Fury. On page 42 Bloom states that in The Sound and the Fury there is a loss of innocence in the main characters. Such as Caddy Compson and her virginity, Benjy Compson's castration, and all the Compson children growing up into a new generation.. Also with this "there becomes an opposition between an older and newer culture, and facing the impossibility of choosing between them"(Hoffman 189). With that in mind the novel can also be interpreted as the fall of the old south compared to the downfall of the Compson family (Lowan 66). Another oddity about The Sound and the Fury is the fact that "death is signified by mud which is associated with Damuddy's death"(Polk 41).

The third theme of The Sound and the Fury is love. Faulkner has a strange way writing about love in his novels. In The Sound and the Fury each narrator has a different conception of love (Lowan 64); Benjy thinks of love as simple and childlike, while Quentin's love is more self-conscious and formal, and Jason has and feels no love at all.