The Fury and the Sound

It's not hard to figure out that in The Sound and the Fury, everything's mixed up.

We've focused on the way Benjy flips around his notion of time and events. Actually, I think his perception of events simply replaces his perception of time -- he has no conscious awareness of time in his life. Time to us, more than anything else, is a reference frame. We use time to organize our thoughts. It marks certain events. It is how we know what to do.

For Benjy, events mark other events. More specifically, his markers are certain sensations that he associates with certain events. Getting caught reminds him of getting caught.

Perhaps Benjy has no "tangible" concept of time because he himself has never "experienced" time. We have all experienced time. We know what it feels like to go from 2003 to 2004 to 2005. We know what if feels like to go from 3rd grade to 4th grade to 5th grade. Benjy knows what it's like to go from immature to immature to just as immature.

This makes it seem as if he is a constant, unchanging in response with time...an objective third person viewer who happens to be part of his story.

Now I see that maybe Benjy isn't as constant and unchanging as I had thought....as Zoe pointed out he only starts moaning at specific point in time. Yet he still has no concept of time -- his reactions may change slightly to the events that come to pass, but I still believe that his perception does not change with sufficient significance. He is just as immature at the end as he was at the beginning (chronologically). After all, he has no idea what the end is and what the beginning is. How could there be a trend when time never really passes for him? (does this make any sense?)