Time After Time: The Temporality of Human Existence in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury

Abstract

This article uses a model of time drawn largely from Heidegger and Ricoeur, which sees three “levels” or dimensions of human time–the mundane, the radical, and the historical. Intentionality on these three levels configures temporal experience in complex, overlapping, and sometimes contradictory ways. Faulkner presents us with a powerful mimesis of this constructive activity. In Faulkner’s portraits of Quentin and Jason, we see two characters struggling with the dialectic between imposition and discovery. Quentin seeks to construct his life in the shape of the story of the South’s loss, as epitomized by Jefferson Davis, and this project leads him to suicide. Jason seeks to fashion and maintain his life as a story of revenge, but by the end of the novel begins to acknowledge another configuration, the story of a man fated to a life of disappointment. Only Dilsey, through “the recollection . . . of the Lamb” has already successfully negotiated the task of discovering a “narrative identity” which enables her to endure what time brings. And the novel asserts that the tale of a life, even when told by an idiot, does not signify nothing, but is richly significant, even if the significance is disquieting.