Caddy Compson: A Foil for Three Brothers Essay Example

she never reprimands him but she tries to get through to him. The first scene Faulkner writes of Caddy and Benjy shows her caring nature and desire to teach Benjy: "Uncle Maury said not to let anybody see us, so we better stoop over. Stoop over, Benjy. Like this, see?" (Faulkner 1).

Another important function Caddy plays for Benjy is her attempt to teach him language. She gives him definitions: “‘It's froze.’ Caddy said, ‘Look.’ She broke the top of the water and held a piece of it against my face. ‘Ice. That means how cold it is’” (Faulkner 9). Minrose C. Gwin asserts that the language Caddy teaches Benjy is more than just definitions of words, but a “maternal language” that will last with him even after she’s gone. She states: “Benjy [loses] Caddy but he remains within her maternal discourse…We can envision him at the state mental hospital, still hearing her speak his name still recognizing the sound of her name within language—a maternal language which transverses the chasm between her subjectivity and his” (409).

The Benjy section of The Sound and the Fury is necessary to illustrate how Caddy really made and broke Benjy's life. The first spoken sentence in the novel demonstrates Benjy’s this most of all: “Here, caddie.” With the mention of Caddy's name, Benjy's own sound begins: "`Listen at you, now.' Luster said. `Ain’t you something, thirty-three years old, going on that way'" (Faulkner 3). This scene exemplifies Benjy's greatest grief and the language that Caddy had helped him develop. In most of the flashbacks of Benjy’s section, he is mute, without sound, but as a grown man taught language by

Caddy, he is able to express his grief. He is not grieving the downfall of the Compson family but the loss of Caddy and his “life of unrelieved, and…meaningless suffering” (Minter 352).

Unlike Benjy’s section, Quentin rarely refers to Caddy and she barely even appears for the first third of his section. But when Quentin approaches his impending suicide he begins to acknowledge Caddy’s importance in his life and his death but he cannot fully recognize his love for Caddy: “And the good Saint Francis that said Little Sister Death, that never had a sister” this talk “a sister” rather than “my sister” begins in the second paragraph and continues throughout the Quentin section and seems like a defense mechanism for Quentin to distance himself from pain and love (Faulkner 49).

Later in Quentin’s section an assortment of different dialogue scenes between Caddy and Quentin show how she created a function for him. Images of pain (Quentin's broken leg) and frustration (sex play with Natalie, smells of the honeysuckle near Caddy and her lovers) show the larger problem—Caddy’s pregnancy and her need for marriage. Caddy personifies the confusion and “despair” that Quentin has with his own role within the family and “the desire for relief and shelter becomes desire for escape” from the role he plays (Minter 352). A scene replete with Quentin’s frustration occurs not in a conversation with Caddy, however, but in the compelling glimpse of the family relationship: "if I'd just had a mother so I could say Mother Mother," (Faulkner 109), prefacing the moment after the wedding:

After they had gone up stairs Mother lay back in her chair, the camphor handkerchief to her

mouth. Father hadn't moved he still sat beside her holding her hand the bellowing hammering away like no place for it in silence. When I was little there was a picture in one of our books, a dark place into which a single weak ray of light came slanting upon two faces lifted out of the shadow. You know what I'd do if I were King? she never was a queen or a fairy she was always a king or a giant or a general I'd break that place open and drag them out and I'd whip them good It was torn out, jagged out. I was glad. I'd have to turn back to it until the dungeon was Mother herself she and Father upward into weak light holding hands and us lost somewhere below even them without even a ray of light.... (Faulkner 109-10).

Caddy makes Quentin's confusion about his role more difficult. David Minter states that “Quentin kills himself in part as punishment for his forbidden desires” with Caddy and “in part, perhaps, because he decides ‘that even she was not quite worth despair’” (352-53). But the real problem for him—and all the other children—is the abandonment of the parental role by both his mother and father. Quentin's feeling of being responsible for Caddy is very much like Caddy's feeling of being responsible for Benjy; they are both assuming roles that have been turned down by their parents. Caddy even tries to give Quentin a new role, taking care of Benjy but Quentin’s role of primary importance is Quentin as a person of feeling and emotion, not Quentin the son or Quentin the protector

of younger sisters and brothers, and Caddy’s pregnancy and wedding brought Quentin to an understanding of his emotions.

By the Jason section, Caddy’s character has once again changed. Jason, unlike Benjy or Quentin, disdains Caddy. David Minter relates Jason’s hostility towards Caddy to a similar root as the other brother’s devotion: “Like Benjy’s and Quentin’s obsessive attachment to Caddy, Jason’s animosity toward her originates in wounds inflicted by Mr. and Mrs. Compson. In short, it is in Caddy that each brother’s discontent finds its focus, as we see in their various evocations of her” (347.) Caddy plays an important role in Jason’s life, just as with the other brothers.

In Jason’s section Caddy is only read in flashbacks and only in those which present her as a mother. Similarly to Benjy and Quentin, she still dominates Jason's consciousness because she is one source of his income as well as the source of his irritation in the person of her daughter Quentin. Much of Jason's life deals with his manipulations of Caddy's money and her child. To Jason Caddy’s character and her daughter’s is seen in his use of pronouns without referents (she, her) and the devastating opening line of Jason's section, "Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say" (Faulkner 113). Jason’s concern with family "honor" is the motivation for much of his cruel behavior toward both Caddy and Quentin; and his role is to echo the only remaining power of the family, his disciplinary mother, Caroline Compson.

The result of Caroline Compson's obsession of keeping up appearances is the tragedy of Jason’s section. Caddy appears very rarely, and then only in chilling attempts to see her

daughter; but her absence is seen through the voices of both Ben and her daughter Quentin. The interaction among the remaining family members makes it clear that Caddy, the source of love in this family, has long since disappeared. Caddy is now a mother, and the few words she does speak are spoken with clarity and maturity. She wants desperately to have her child, but she accepts the reality and allows Jason to keep Quentin, helping Jason to fulfill his greed and power-hungry desire.

Faulkner's presentation of Caddy in The Sound and the Fury is central to the wreck of the Compson family. Ubiquitous in the Benjy section, Caddy was the source of real love. By the Quentin section, however, Caddy was wrapped up in her own problems, but her concern for both Benjy and Quentin created a function of confusion for Quentin. Caddy, the positive character, gradually disappears by the Jason section helping him to fulfill his role of the disciplinary of Compson family honor. Caddy's gentle and helpful voice has vanished by the fourth section of the book, having already accomplished her role for each of respective brothers and the novel.