Benjy Compson
Benjy is a son of Jason Compson III and Caroline Compson, formerly Caroline Bascomb, and the brother of Jason, Quentin, and Caddy. Benjy was born Maury Compson, named after his mother's brother, on April 7, 1895. When it became clear that he was mentally retarded, his mother changed his name to Benjamin, saying that it is a good name because it comes from the Bible (58). After he escapes from his family's yard and grabs a girl walking to school, his testicles are surgically removed (73). At the age of thirty-three, he is described as “a big man who appeared to have been shaped of some substance whose particles would not or did not cohere to one another or to the frame which supported it. His skin was dead looking and hairless; dropsical too, he moved with a shambling gait like a trained bear. His hair was pale and fine. It had been brushed smoothly down upon his brow like that of children in daguerrotypes. His eyes were clear, of the pale sweet blue of cornflowers, his thick mouth hung open, drooling a little” (274). He is mentally retarded, and he narrates the first section of The Sound and the Fury in a difficult to comprehend stream of consciousness style that reflects his condition: he is unable to process events around him with any sophistication, and he tends to begin narrating events from days or even years past if he encounters a stimulus that reminds him of the past event. From Reading Benjy's Section:
“Wait a minute.” Luster said. “You snagged on that nail again. Cant you never crawl through here without snagging on that nail.”
Caddy uncaught me and we crawled through. Uncle Maury said to not let anybody see us, so we better stoop over, Caddy said. Stoop over, Benjy. Like this, see. We stooped over and crossed the garden, where the flowers rasped and rattled against us. The ground was hard . . .
What happened here was Benjy heard the word “nail” and began to narrate another occasion when he was stuck on the nail, as evidenced by the switch to italics and the change from Luster to Caddy. You might have also noticed that Luster's question, “Cant you never crawl through here without snagging on that nail,” lacks both an apostrophe in the conjunction “Cant” and a question mark. To some, this indicates Benjy's narrative role as being simply a mirror for what he sees and hears, colored with stray thoughts and past experiences.”
Also peculiar about Benjy's narration is his descriptive synesthesia; that is, his tendency to mix his senses, as in the sentence “The sun was cold and bright.” The sun is not, of course, cold, but since it is cold outside while the sun is bright, he believes that it is the sun that is cold. He also “smells” his father's death and somehow is able to tell when Caddy lost her virginity (34, 69).
See Also:
Works
Selected Bibliography
Polk, Noel. “Trying Not to Say: A Primer on the Language of The Sound and the Fury.” New Essays on The Sound and the Fury. Ed. Noel Polk. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 139-75.
Matthews, John T. The Play of Faulkner's Language. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1982.
Roggenbuck, Ted. “The way he looked said Hush': Benjy's mental atrophy in The Sound and the Fury.” Mississippi Quarterly 58:3/4 (Summer 2005): 581-593.
