Caddy Compson is a tragic character, and the heart of her tragedy is
revealed in two intense, excruciating conversations with Quentin. The second, the
night before her wedding to Herbert, is suffused with deep despair
and unbearable anguish. The only way Caddy, a girl who can never forget
her family’s pride and the social code by which she has been raised, can
escape her impossible situation is by marriage to a man of respectable
family, even if that man is unworthy of her. Caddy is sick with her
pregnancy, sick with worry about Benjy and Father, sick at the prospect
of marrying a man she can never respect for the sake of preserving
appearances and placating social convention. But in that conversation
she alludes to an even more important side of her character when she
says to Quentin, “since I since last summer” and “I died last year.”
Although she cannot bring herself to finish the first sentence, her
words suggest that the key to understanding the hell on earth in which
she has lived for the last year and from which she must escape at all
costs lies in the events of the preceding summer.
Caddy’s
first conversation with Quentin, crucial to our full understanding of
what happened to Caddy that summer, took place one evening at the branch
where she and Quentin have played since childhood. Like their brother
Benjy, Quentin has somehow intuited Caddy’s loss of virginity, and to
Quentin’s obsessive regard for family pride and the social codes of the
old South, the knowledge is horrifying, undermining the very foundations
of his identity. But Quentin’s understanding is limited by his
inability to accept the passing of time or his sister’s growing
womanhood and the changes both have wrought in the idyllic and idealized
version of Caddy he carries within himself. Therefore his whole being
yearns to deny what has occurred, his every thought becomes a desperate
attempt to make the horror vanish, by falsely claiming incest so he and
Caddy can be sent away together, by running away and taking Benjy with
them, even by a mutual suicide pact.
What Quentin
cannot understand or acknowledge, however, is that what has happened to
Caddy is not only a social disgrace, anathema to his code of honor, but
also something rare and magical and wonderful. For Caddy—passionate,
headstrong, courageous, willful, maternal, devoted and defiant, to whom
young men have been attracted since she was fourteen—has found with
Dalton Ames the most mysterious and precious and powerful force in human
life. She has discovered the dizzying passion and desire of love. And
because she has fallen in love with Dalton Ames, because the mere sound
of his name makes her blood race, she has given herself to him, body and
soul, and the resulting explosion destroys her entire family. Because
Caddy falls in love, Mother rejects her, despises her, and spies on her;
Mother and Father argue bitterly about her; Father drinks more and more
heavily; Caddy and Dalton are somehow torn apart; Caddy’s emptiness and
despair lead her to promiscuity, pregnancy, marriage to a despicable
man, and exile from her family; Quentin’s life becomes unbearable and
ends in suicide; Benjy is left to endure a lifetime of inexhaustible
grief and loss; and her daughter Quentin is raised in a house where she
will know neither mother nor father—all because a vibrant, radiant,
passionate girl of seventeen fell in love.
The Sound and the Fury
is a modern Southern tragedy, and like all tragedies, the suffering and
destruction it portrays spring from the most fundamentally human
qualities of its characters. Of these characters, by far the most human,
the most fully alive, and, in the end, the most utterly betrayed by
life, is Caddy Compson (625).
