It's the final countdown

Well, I have officially completed The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner decided that the sequence of his narrations should go as such: 

ridiculously hard to comprehend, I don't think I can do this

--holy cow, are you serious right now?

--I can understand you but I wish you'd go away

--wow, this is basic speech! 

I think that Faulkner did this intentionally to 1) grab our attention as a reader 2) force us to really search for the little details and 3) relay a theme of time 

It has an interesting affect on the narration because the varying complication of each, reveals something about the character. The most interesting thing to me was that the novel started with Benjy, three days before Christ's death and ended with Dilsy's 3rd person narration, right around the time of Easter. I think that this novel is truly about the absurd "values" of the Old South and needed shift to the values of New South, which is manifested as Caddy. 

I think the Macbeth quote "[life] is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing." is a perfect symbol of the abstract meaning of the novel as a whole. It encompasses why Faulkner used various characters to tell the story of the Compson family. 

Jason, the devil

Jason's chapter was ultimately a big reveal of what a huge jerk he is. A continuous theme throughout the entire chapter was his blatant bitterness toward everyone and everything, the only character he shows slight sympathy to is his mom, but this is merely to take advantage of her. In fact, his horrible attitude is identified in the very first line of this chapter, "once a bitch, always a bitch." This line set the tone for the rest of the chapter. Whether it was mocking his brother'a suicide, or his generalization of all girls as sluts, Jason is an angry, angry man. He has a big mouth and yet never follows through in action. For example he says to give a woman a "bust in the jaw" to set her straight, and yet he never lays a finger on miss Quentin. My questions for this chapter are how does Jason follow the theme of time throughout the novel and what sparked his ridiculous bitterness. 

Quentin

    Quentin's chapter was quite the complicated read. I had already struggled at trying to grasp the lapses in time throughout Benjy's chapter, but it seems as though Quentin's was just a jumbled stream of consciousness. Although Benjy was able to maintain a state of "unbiased" throughout his narration, Quentin's overuse of "I" has made it difficult to discern was was real and what was a result of his own dispositions. It was almost frustrating because his use of I wasn't always consistent, sometime his recollections seemed as if he didn't even acknowledge his own presence even though he was talking directly about himself. 

Quentin has this absurd, compulsive obsession with time. From his grandfather'a watch to the sound of the bells. This indicates a certain mental ailment, potentially even more unstable then Benjy, and made his narration even more confusing. Not to mention the fact that this whole chapter takes place before Benjy's did, so I still have no grasp at the sequence of this overall novel. However, through Quentin's streamp of consciousness that seems to trump all boundaries of time, I am predicting that it  is a significant factor and theme of this book. 

Quentin's mental instability is also auppirted by his rigid obsession with honor, which is a cultural aspect, one rooted into the Deep South, but he takes it to another level. Both Benjy and Quentin share an intense love for Caddy, and when Caddy becomes pregnant by a foreign man, Quentin tries to convince his father that he and caddy have commited incest. 

It's the culmination of his obsession with time, honor, and blurry overuse of "I", that made Quentin's chapter not only confusing, but ultimately, very telling of his character.