Quentin Compson"s Song of Death: Memory in The Sound and the Fury

Quentin Compson"s Song of Death: Memory in The Sound and the Fury

  Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury struggles to grasp the essence of memory, despite its highly subjective and selective remembering acts. Faulkner"s novel, recognizing the nature of memory, not only reveals an understanding of how memory/the past affects the present, but also questions how one lives with traumatic memories. Through Quentin Compson, Faulkner creates the act of memory in its most intense and dramatic form, with time painfully enfolded. To Quentin, memory comes into being as a deathlike power to negate what exists now. Past and present, coalesced as one in his mind, offer him no solace but torment and inner darkness. Quentin is haunted by Caddy, by fleeting time, and by the "shadow" of his own death; his story attains its truth only by its revelation in the maddening disintegration of his self. Quentin"s war over the maddening pool of memory called Caddy is waged in the form of traumatic fantasies, mourning, and the gradual disintegration of self. Caddy only offers a temporary "shadowy paradoxical" reality for his present being that is also his non-being. Thus, questioning how memory makes significant traces in the present of the living, this work attempts to speculate on the possible meanings and reasons for Quentin"s death.