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Stream Of Consciousness In William Faulkner's The Sound And The Fury

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In The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner uses a literary technique called stream of consciousness. This is a style of writing in which a character 's thoughts and emotions are depicted in a continuous motion uninterrupted by dialog. Faulkner uses this technique to demonstrate Benjy’s train of thought. Benjy can not understand how the world around him works. He has no perception of cause and effect or time, but he rather merely absorbs aspects of the world that is directly affecting him. Benjy can, however, sense when something in his world is out of order or when something tragic happens to one of his family members. He was able to sense Quentin 's suicide over a thousand miles away at Harvard, and he senses Caddy’s promiscuity. Considering Benjy’s disability, he is one of the only members of the Compson family who truly notices the steady decline of the family. Benjy revolves his mind around certain patterns of familiar memories and becomes upset when something is out of place with one of those certain memories. By doing this, Benjy is not able to draw connections between the past and present that the other family members can. One of those distinction connections Benjy makes in his mind is the deaths in the Compson family. “There was a fire in the house, rising and falling, with Roskus sitting black against it/That’s three, thank the Lawd.” Roskus said”, this section and the several scenes that follow deal with the idea of death that Benjy has when he remembered

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