A scene can change its time before a reader has found a date. In the opening of The Sound and the Fury, a snagged garment carries Benjy’s narration from one companion to another. These short passages offer a way to follow the movement while keeping useful uncertainties open.
Begin with what the narrator notices
Through the fence
The novel’s first section is headed “April Seventh, 1928.” Benjy watches activity beyond a fence while Luster searches for a lost quarter. The opening gives the reader perceptions and movements before a full explanation of the setting.
Make a small map with two sides: what Benjy can perceive, and what you infer about the situation. A fence belongs in the first column. A larger account of the family or the nearby game belongs in the second until further details support it. This distinction keeps a plausible guess from quietly becoming a fact.
For a first reading, choose a manageable stretch: the opening through the first remembered crossing of the fence. Track the immediate action before trying to reconstruct the whole novel’s chronology.
Use the change of companion as a time signal
You snagged on that nail again.
Caddy uncaught me and we crawled through.
Luster speaks in the first passage; Caddy helps Benjy in the next. The repeated physical situation connects two occasions. The surrounding remembered scene introduces cold, hard ground and preparations associated with Christmas. Those details help distinguish it from the opening day.
Benjy’s first-person perspective continues across the transition. What changes is the occasion being experienced and the person beside him. Label the movement “present scene to remembered scene” before attempting an exact year. Italics offer another cue in this edition, but names, sensations and actions also carry the transition.
A useful margin note
Trigger: caught clothing at a fence. Companion before: Luster. Companion after: Caddy. New setting clues: cold and hard ground. Open question: how much earlier is this occasion?
A note that preserves an open question is useful. It lets later evidence improve your account without making each difficult sentence a test you must solve immediately.
Separate the writer’s design from the narrator’s knowledge
to know the future of his own people
In the 1957 interview, A. K. Davis asks about Faulkner’s use of future events within a description of the present. Faulkner explains the writer’s knowledge of a character’s future as part of making a book. Read that later account alongside the novel: it concerns the author’s construction of events.
In a close reading, ask two separate questions. What can this narrator perceive now? What relationship between moments does the arrangement of the prose allow a reader to discover? An author can arrange a connection that a character never explains.
Keep a three-line reading log
- Locate: record the companion, place and immediate action.
- Notice a change: mark a new name, season, repeated sound or physical sensation.
- Revise: add one sentence about how the later passage changes your understanding of the earlier one.
Try the method on the next two transitions. Retain the original wording for your evidence, and put your proposed sequence of events in your own words. If a passage remains uncertain, describe the uncertainty precisely: an unidentified speaker, an unclear elapsed interval or a repeated event.
For a different relation between an event and its telling, explore Conrad’s framed narration. For multiple narrators, compare Emily Brontë’s layers of testimony.
About these selections
Source notes identify the wording and edition used. Interpretations and exercises are Yenra’s. Follow the linked text when citing or comparing a passage.