The Sound and the Fury

This rhetorical device is technique by which a writer conflates one sense with another; that is, something typically pertaining to one sense is actually described by another. Faulkner employs this device throughout the book, particularly in scenes wherein Benjy perceives events and circumstances. For example, when Benjy is waiting for Caddy to return home from school for the Christmas holidays, he thinks, “I couldn’t feel the gate at all, but I could smell the bright cold” (6). Coldness is usually associated with the sense of touch, a feeling one perceives through the skin, but here Benjy can “smell” it. This not only serves to highlight his preternatural sense of smell but also to immerse the reader in the sensory world of winter—where the cold is so crisp that one can smell it. Later, when Benjy drops off to sleep, his senses again ramp up: “Caddy held me and I could hear us all, and the darkness, and something I could smell. And then I could see the windows, where the trees were buzzing” (85). The darkness is palpable, not merely something to perceive visually but viscerally; Benjy can hear it, just as he hears the enlivened trees “buzzing.” This sensory description foreshadows the events to come: Caddy’s, and later Miss Quentin’s, penchant for sneaking out of the house by climbing down the trees. This kind of willful behavior eventually leads to their transgressive exploits and eventual fade into the darkness that exists beyond the confines of Benjy’s family home.

Faulkner also employs synesthesia to emphasize Quentin’s distress in the moments before his death by suicide: “My nose could see gasoline, the vest on the table, the door” (199). Thinking of Benjy, Quentin remembers both his sacrifice (Benjy’s pasture is sold so Quentin can attend Harvard) and his ability to sniff out death: “A fine dead sound we will swap Benjy’s pasture for a fine dead sound. It will last him a long time because he cannot hear it unless he can smell it” (200). A dead sound is silence, and as Quentin’s time is winding down, he wonders whether Benjy will smell his faraway death. Even the insensitive Jason catches the whiff of betrayal as he pursues the elusive Miss Quentin: “And the fact that he must depend on that red tie [worn by Miss Quentin’s male companion] seemed to be the sum of the impending disaster; he could almost smell it, feel it above the throbbing of his head” (356). The conflation and profusion of the senses emphasizes the dramatic endings that mark the Compson family’s dissolution.