12AP Literature (Barraza: Fall 2018)
The Sound and the Fury Culminating Essay Choices
200 Points: No rewrites for this paper will be allowed.
Due Date: Tuesday, November 20th
Choose one of the following essay suggestions:
1. What are the reasons for Quentin’s decision to drown himself? In your response, you might want to consider some of the following guiding questions: What do you see as the meaning of his dual obsession with his sister’s virginity and the loss of the family honor? Why does he attempt to make, in a crucial conversation with his father, a false confession of incest? Given Quentin’s state of mind at the time, what do you think of Mr. Compson’s response to him? Also consider whether Quentin’s tragedy is caused by his mother who has failed him as a source of love and by his father who has failed him as a counselor.
2. Eric Sundquist in his book, Faulkner: The House Divided, writes the following about Caddy: “There is probably no major character in literature about whom we know so little in proportion to the amount of attention she receives.” For her brothers, Caddy is the traumatic absence at the center of their experience. For Faulkner, Caddy was the image around which the novel took shape; she was “the sister which I did not have and the daughter which I was to lose,” and it all began with the image of “the muddy bottom of a little doomed girl climbing a blooming pear tree in April to look in the window” at the funeral of her grandmother. While Caddy is presented as maternal, erotic, promiscuous, and imperious, she is also unknowable, given that she can only be glimpsed in the rather unreliable narrations of her brothers. Please provide a critical analysis of Caddy’s role or function in the novel. In your response, you might want to consider some of the following guiding questions: Is Caddy’s fall the cause of the family tragedy or is she just another child-victim of the abdication of parental responsibility? Why do Caddy’s brothers each have a narrative voice, while Caddy has none? Does Caddy function as a conduit for the emergence or decline of other characters?
3. Jason is an embittered young man with a nasty sense of humor. Nonetheless, he is the querulous Mrs. Compson’s favorite, the son upon whom she depends. He imagines people saying of his siblings, “one of them is crazy and another one drowned himself and the other one was turned out into the street by her husband.” Do you think he succeeds in preserving the appearance of normality that is so important to him? Consider Jason’s mode of thinking and reasoning as well as some of his activities and preoccupations. What is the effect of his narrative’s mood and voice, following as it does upon Benjy’s and Quentin’s?
4. On April 15, 1957, during his time as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia, William Faulkner was asked the following question: Then may I ask if all of these characters in The Sound and the Fury—that you would call them ‘good people’? In response, Faulkner said: I would call them tragic people. The good people, Dilsey, the Negro woman, she was a good human being. That she held that family together for not the hope of reward but just because it was the decent and proper thing to do.
Consider the role that Dilsey plays in the novel. Why does the narrative of the fourth and final section focus upon her, and why do you think Faulkner chose not to give her a narrative in her own voice? Consider the significance of the black community and its church in the final section. Also consider how the novel ends on Easter Sunday and whether this might suggest an overtly Christian context for readers.
5. In what ways do the themes of the novel transcend the tale of a single family’s decline to become a much larger American story? Should you choose to answer this question, please note that the novel must be the root and the river of the paper, meaning that the text should drive the analytical conversation, regardless of the outside historical or sociological sources you might choose to utilize.
6. The novel takes into its scope a number of serious philosophical and psychological issues–the meaning of time, for instance, and the psychopathology of the family–but it does not devote itself to a cohesive exploration of any of them. What, then, would you say this novel is “about”? Think again about the Macbethquotation–life is “a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.” What does Faulkner’s tale, told four times, signify? What does it achieve? In what ways does the novel focus our attention upon the problem of representing consciousness realistically within the novel form? As a conclusion for this question, consider how the novelchanges or affects your experience as a reader of novels.
7. Edith Hamilton, the renowned classicist, once pointed out that Faulkner’s works are often about ugly people in an ugly land. To what degree is this argument valid?
8. After reading “The Bear,” you were able to conclude that the bear is a symbol, a totem of the unspoken bond with nature. In what ways does The Sound and the Furyilluminate the inevitable loss of this bond?
9. In what way is the novel structured in a musical, symphonic way? Should you choose to answer this question, please note that the novel must be the root and the river of the paper, meaning that the text should drive the analytical conversation, regardless of the music-related sources you might choose to utilize.
10. The Sound and the Fury questions our assumptions about time as regular, linear, sequential, predictable. What are some of the ways in which time is disrupted in this novel? What does Faulkner seem to be saying about man’s relationship with time?
11. Which characters, if any, serve as registers of emotional and moral value? In whom do we find love, honor, loyalty, strength? Is Jason the embodiment of the opposite traits? How does Caddy’s daughter, Quentin, fit into the scheme of value here? What about Mrs. Compson? Do Benjy’s perceptions function as a sort of touchstone for the reader?
12. As an opportunity to validate your own reading and critical engagement of this novel, consider the findings or contemporary connections you’ve been able to make. Write an argumentative essay that derives from your own critical attention to a particular aspect (or aspects) of the novel.
Due Date: Tuesday, November 20th. Please note that papers must weave in textual evidence in order to be considered valid arguments. Papers must be a full 4-6 pages in length, utilizing the proper MLA guidelines. Papers must move beyond simple summary. The key to your success with this paper is having a clear purpose in your argument. Remember, content and form matter; thus, your paper should be organized, cogent, analytically developed, balanced, full, and clean in terms of mechanics and syntax. Please note that any papers plagiarizing external sources will result in a 0 grade.
May your paper signify more than nothing!
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