The Compsons of Jefferson, Mississippi, are William Faulkner's great study in decline: a family that once produced a governor and a Confederate brigadier general, and by 1928 cannot keep a daughter or a name. The line runs from Governor Quentin MacLachan Compson II through his son General Jason Lycurgus Compson II, who mortgaged the domain in 1866, and then through his son Jason Richmond Lycurgus Compson III, who sold the pasture that became a golf course, to the four children of 1928. Three of them narrate The Sound and the Fury — Benjy, Quentin and Jason — with a final third-person section centered chiefly on Dilsey. Every male is measured against the general, and every one falls short.
The center of the diagram is Jason Richmond Compson III (1863-1912), a lawyer, ironist and alcoholic, and his wife Caroline Bascomb Compson, a hypochondriac who withholds affection and keeps her sponging brother Maury L. Bascomb in pocket money. Their marriage is a distance rather than a bond, and their four children divide along it. Quentin Compson III (1891-1910) inherits his father's fatalism and drowns himself in the Charles River at Harvard. Candace 'Caddy' Compson (b. 1892) is the absent center, loved by Quentin and Benjy and unforgiven by her mother. Jason Compson IV (b. 1894) is Caroline's favorite, 'the only one with any Bascomb blood.' Benjamin 'Benjy' Compson (b. 1895), born Maury and renamed at five, narrates without chronology.
The fractures are the story. Quentin's fixation on Caddy's purity fuses him to her honor, and her affair with Dalton Ames — the bridge confrontation where Quentin strikes out feebly, is restrained and faints — seals his ruin. Pregnant, Caddy is married off in 1910 to the Indiana banker Herbert Head, who divorces her when he learns the child is not his; her daughter, Miss Quentin (b. 1911), is raised in the Compson house without her. Jason IV, cheated of the bank job Herbert promised, cuts Caddy off and embezzles the money she sends for her daughter, until in 1928 the girl climbs down the pear tree with nearly seven thousand dollars taken from his metal box — his savings as well as her stolen support. He later sells the house and has Benjy institutionalized.
Against all of this stands the Gibson household: Dilsey, the cook who says 'Ise seed de first en de last' and then 'I seed de first en de last,' her husband Roskus the stableman, their children Versh, Frony and T. P., and Frony's son Luster, called fourteen and charged with minding the thirty-three-year-old Benjy. Three generations of Gibsons feed, dress and shield the Compson children where the parents will not. Faulkner drew the line himself in the Compson appendix he wrote in 1945 and first published in 1946, ending the Compsons and closing on Dilsey's entry with two words: 'They endured.'
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