William Faulkner did not write love stories. However, we can learn a lot about the nature of love from the Compson children and Dilsey.

Love is never discussed in William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury. However, the characters themselves give us a complex view of the various aspects of love.

The Aspect of Love in Caddy

Caddy loves unconditionally. She loves her father with the love reserved for fathers. She loves and defends Benjy. She treats Benjy like a normal human with normal feelings and concerns. She has an intense brotherly love for and is best friends with her brother Quentin. She acts as if she expects nothing from those she loves.

However, she betrays her lack of expectation when she seeks love from boys and has a string of sexual relationships. Caddy’s generous and loving heart desires love above all other things of this world. Her craving for love propels into her sexual promiscuity and in the end drives her away from all those she loves including her infant.

Quentin’s Romantic Guilt-Laced Love

Quentin is a traditionalist and is rooted in the traditional southern ideals of honor, purity, virtue, and nobility. He loves the idea of an orderly life and obsessively loves his sister Caddy.

Throughout the last day of his life, Quentin returns to of memories about his father. Through these memories, we realize that while Quentin loves and respects his father, he can’t live the way his father does and so rebels. Quentin holds to romantic ideals that can’t be reconciled with his father’s beliefs and while society sees these ideals as passé, Quentin wants to affirm their value. Quentin’s rebellion ends in his suicide; the ultimate romantic statement denying his father’s beliefs.

As Quentin grows to sexual maturity he finds in Caddy both an ideal in the feminine role and the antithesis to his ideal. Caddy’s nurturing and loving nature fits into Quentin’s idea of a ideal woman and as he matures in the dysfunctional Compson household his love of the ideal and the aspects of that ideal that he finds in Caddy is warped into incestuous desire. The flip-side of his incestuous love of Caddy is his jealous love. He is both envious of her lovers and disappointed in Caddy for her loss of virtue.

These two sides of Quentin’s love form a dangerous combination. The love of the ideal is a love that can never be satisfied in another human. In addition, Quentin’s incestuous desire for his ideal is forbidden. The forbidden nature of his ideal love is catastrophic for Quentin.

His jealous love is also destructive. Quentin’s jealousy causes him to fight men he can’t hope to defeat. His literal fights with these men reflect his symbolic fights against the evolution of society from an ideal world to a realistic and depraved world. These are battles Quentin cannot win, as a result, the nearly inevitable conclusion of his love is suicide.

Jason’s Irrational Self-Love

Longley describes Jason as the embodiment of “instinctive, irrational love of self; the monstrous, incestuous self-concern that leaves no room for love of others.” He goes on to suggest that those who are in love with themselves cannot admit their own imperfection and thus punish others who thwart them.

Those who are full of self-love must justify themselves by making themselves appear worthy of love. To create a sense of self-worth they build themselves up by destroying others. Jason feels that he is surrounded by idiots who do not recognize how much work and self-sacrifice he engages in to support them and to satisfy his inept boss.

Self-love is doomed to failure. The more things go wrong in Jason’s life the more he must blame others. Blame and anger lead to bitterness and a vicious circle of dissatisfaction is created.

Dilsey’s Christian Love

Dilsey’s love is an affirmation of a higher love. Near the beginning of the book when Benjy’s name is changed from Maury to Benjy, she affirms her belief in a lover who will always remember her name when she says it is written in the ‘Book.’

She knows that God’s love is unconditional and without expectation and she voices that belief when she says “de good Lawd don’t keer whether he bright er not.”

At the end of the book, she shows the arc of unending love when she walks away from the Easter morning church service crying. She reflects on her patient care of the Compsons and realizes “I seed the beginnin, en now I sees de endin.”

It is Dilsey’s belief in a patient lover who sees past our failings and shortcomings; a lover who never changes yet allows us to change; a lover who is always there; a lover who loves others more than himself that allows her to avoid the pitfalls of love that are embodied by Caddy, Quentin, and Jason. Human love needs fulfillment and as we can see in the examples of Caddy, Quentin, and Jason. Fulfillment is seldom if ever found in other humans. Dilsey found her fulfillment in her faith and love in Christ.

Sources

John L. Longley Jr. "The Sound and the Fury: The Death of a Family." Novels for Students. Ed. Marie Rose Napierkowski. Vol. 4. Detroit: Gale, 1998. eNotes.com. January 2006. 23 October 2007.

More About William Faulkner's Masterpiece The Sound and the Fury.

• A review of the novel.
• A summary of the novel.
• Major characters in the novel.
• Minor characters in the novel.
• Discussion questions regarding William Faulkner's style in the novel.
• Discussion questions regarding themes in the novel.