IS TIME REAL?

Ever since the concept was created, time has ruled men and women. You can be late to school, and you get detention. You are late to a job interview, you might not eat for a week. But is time really relevant? Does it really matter if it is seven or six o'clock?

Quite possibly, my favorite aspect of this novel is the way Faulkner toys with the concept of time. He uses Benjy to illustrate the uselessness of time. Benjy is perhaps the most pure and inherently good child of the Compson family, yet he has zero knowledge of time. He can still remember events from the past, and the feelings those events provoke. But he does not realize that they are in the past, he simply remembers them when something reminds him of them. Faulkner is pointing out that for Benjy, time is unimportant, and he still leads a normal life (other than his retardation). Benjy doesn't live by the clock, and he remains the most pure child.

Quentin, on the other hand, is ruled by the clock. He continually lives out things from his past, and avoids the present. He is obsessed with his childhood with Caddy, and the fantasy that he committed incest with her when they were younger. Quentin also breaks his watch, and symbolically, he is cut by the broken glass. This symbolizes Quentin's eventual downfall to time, blood is drawn from him because of time. When he goes into the clock store, he asks the watchmaker if the clocks are right, but he doesn't wish to know what time it is. He is so obsessed with falling into his past fantasies, that Quentin becomes unable to live in the present and future. Therefore, time becomes a constant reminder that Quentin is no longer living in his glorified past. And because he can no longer live in the past Quentin takes his own life because time will always exist to remind him that he is in the present.;

Faulkner, in the first two chapters has already shown the ways time can affect humanity. Benjy has no concept of time, and Quentin is ruled by time itself. These two opposing takes on time in the first two chapters challenge the idea of time itself. Benjy gets along just fine without time, and Quentin kills himself because of time, Faulkner is arguing if we even need time in society. Of course, the world would be very unorganized without time, but Faulkner's arguments remain very compelling especially since he argues his point through the development of characters in THE SOUND AND THE FURY.