Quentins Struggle in The Sound and the Fury Essay -- Sound and the Fu

Quentins Struggle in The Sound and the Fury Too much happens...Man performs, engenders so much to a greater extent than he provide or should have to bear. Thats how he finds that he can bear anything. William Faulkner (Fitzhenry 12) In Faulkners The Sound and the Fury, we are given a persona known as Quentin, one who helps us more fully take the words of the author when delivering his Nobel Prize acceptance speech The young earthly concern or wo humanity writing today has forgotten the problems of the human emotional state in conflict with itself (The Faulkner subscriber 3). Quentin engenders so much more than he can or should have to bear, as the opening quote by Faulkner suggests is the fate of all humans, but he does not discover he can bear anything. Instead, Quentins heart is so in conflict with itself, a condition Faulkner argues many overlook in his speech excerpt above, that he commits suicide. There are three kinds of struggles in life. There is man versus the uni verse, man versus man, and man versus himself. Quentins conflict is with himself. In fact, despite his imagining otherwise, Quentin is completely locked within himself, ineffective to cope with external reality. Internal reality is the only reality which he entertains. Like Hamlet, he tries to live up to the midlandized idealized image of personality and himself that he imagines should be external reality. As noted in Thompson and Vickery (224) psychologically unbalanced by his own inner and outer conflicts, Quentin is represented as being partly responsible not only for what has happened to himself but excessively for what has happened to some other members of his family. He has permitted his warped and warping ego to countermand exactly those basic and primit... ... 87) Thus, we can see that Quentins internal fictions of what he would alike(p) reality to be are too much for him to endure in the face of existential realities that are all too often not aesthetic. He cannot e ndure because he cannot bear the distance between his internal fictions of reality and reality as it truly exists outside those fictions. WORKS CITED The Faulkner Reader Selections from the Works of William Faulkner. New York, Random House, 1954. Faulkner, W. The Sound and the Fury. New York, Random House, 1956. Fitzhenry, R. I. (ed.). The Barnes & solemn Book of Quotations. New York, Barnes & Noble Books, 1987. Hoffman, F. J. and Vickery, O. W. William Faulkner Three Decades of Criticism. New York, Harbinger, 1960. Polk, N. New Essays On The Sound and the Fury. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993.