Closure in the Last Section of The Sound and The Fury

In William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, the fourth and last section of the novel delivers an interesting, but atypical conclusion to an already abnormal novel. Upon reading the last section, one might feel as if the novel ends incomplete and without resolution of the Compson family tragedy. Benjy is still treated more like a dog than as a human; Jason still runs the household with an iron fist; Mother remains the selfish, "o-so-pitiful" matriarch; and now both Caddy and Quentin are absent from the novel, after having escaped into the world outside Jefferson. Yet, while in the average story, this conclusion may be regarded as inconclusive, it is, in fact, the exact conclusion that Faulkner wants. According to Lawrence Edward Bowling, a professor at Kenyon College, "The Sound and the Fury is a novel about disorder, disintegration, and the absence of perspective" that is centered around "the internal chaos of the characters,--their intellectual, moral, and spiritual confusion" (Bowling 15). Thus, it is Faulkner's main intention to leave the reader with such a conclusion in order to reflect the chaos and disorder plaguing the family and that he views as his main theme. By leaving all the remaining characters in their current predicaments--Benjy screaming, Luster out of it, mother absent from the rest, and Jason as angry as ever--he effectively demonstrates that this order cannot be resolved and that three decades has done no good to help this chaotic family. Ultimately, on a larger scale, this ending, as well as the book as a whole, shows a tragic transformation of family from the nineteenth to the twentieth century and thus provides modernist critique of twentieth century life.