In The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner draws attention to Benjy's ability to see through his inability to speak. His character tends towards omniscience, as he constantly encounters (or takes part in) various clandestine acts but has no power to articulate these events. Through these situations, Benjy emerges as a weakened representative of Jesus, capable of seeing much, but unable to influence the immoral actions he encounters. The parallels between Benjy and Jesus seem clear; the reader first meets him on his thirty-third birthday, the day before Easter, etc. However, Benjy represents an extremely diluted version of what Jesus "should" be, able to change events only through his watchful eyes, and even then only the vaguest terms, unable to make any real difference in the characters' lives. He discovers both Caddy (seemingly the less corrupt Compson) and Quentin in the woods with the lovers, causing both girls to run away from the situation. Even so, in both cases Benjy merely delays the inevitable: Caddy marries at fourteen, and Quentin runs away the next morning with her lover. Benjy then plays the contradictory role of a voiceless moral "voice", making others uncomfortable with their immorality by observing them instead of scolding them. With Benjy playing the role of the symbolic Jesus in the novel, it seems that the larger implications concern the seemingly inevitable decay of any concrete human value, with only a vague paranoia about the "wrongness" of one's actions superseding true religious feelings. Faulkner offers a kind of racialized alternative to the Compsons in Dilsey by demonstrating his stronger sense of spirituality. Dilsey's family, however, simply delays the decay of humanity, and if Dilsey represents a moral authority with a voice, almost no one listens to her. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Most of the significant moments in Benjy's narrative arise from his innocent encounter with some sort of immoral enterprise that he would not have access to if he were not mentally disabled. Either other people force Benjy to participate, or he actually stumbles into the situation. One of the first such instances occurs when he acts as a messenger between Uncle Maury and the adulterous Mrs. Patterson (which he does wrong by giving the note to Mr. Patterson) and promptly runs away (9). TP and the male Quentin also force him to participate in their drunken "sassprilluh" session, which they give to him partly because they want him to "shut up" and not give them away to the rest of the wedding (14). In both of these cases, others force Benjy to perform these acts and he manages to stop them somehow. When he finds Caddy and the female Quentin in the woods, however, he does so independently and even against the orders of his keepers. Benjy therefore seems to have a "nose" for discovering what is shamefully hidden, always acting as an innocent witness, producing a sense of guilt in Caddy and at least interrupting Quentin's meeting with his lover. He comes between the girls and their immoral sexual relationships outside of marriage, but only on the vaguest moral basis: their discomfort with continuing before Benjy's innocent eyes. When Benjy catches Caddy with Charlie in the woods, he initially tries to go home, and it seems that only during the meeting with his brother does he realize the guilt of his actions. She "confesses" to Benjy, and he gives her a revelation of sorts regarding his promiscuity. Faulkner writes, Charlie came and put his hands on Caddy and I cried more... "You're crazy." Caddy said. "He cansee. Don't do it. Don't do it." Caddy fought...Caddy and I ran...I could hear her and feel her chest. "I won't do it." she said. "I won't do it again, ever. Benjy. Benjy." Then she cried, and I cried, and we hugged. "Silence." she said. "Silence. I won't do it again." So I shut up and Caddy got up and we went into the kitchen and turned on the light and Caddy got the kitchen soap and washed her mouth at the sink, hard. (31) Here, Faulkner clearly highlights Benjy's role as an observer in what makes Caddy take him home. She tells Charlie that "he can see" as the only reason why he shouldn't touch her in Benjy's presence. After Caddy and Benjy arrive home , guilt overwhelms her and she cries, repeating both Benjy's name and his promise, "I won't do it again." It seems that with such a silent and innocent witness nearby the immoral act of promiscuity simply cannot continue ; in fact, Benjy's watchful eyes make Caddy realize the error of her ways. In this way Benjy continues his role as "Jesus" by being the person to whom his sister in a sense "confesses" his shame and. , perhaps, also undergoes a penance by washing his mouth with soap. However, this newly established morality ultimately fails; Caddy loses her virginity a few years later and gets married the following year, after having sullied herself by having sex before marriage. Even so, it is because Caddy exists among the less corrupt Compsons that she feels some kind of morality through Benjy: her daughter, Quentin, only allows Benjy to interrupt her tryst with the showman, and does not appear to gain any advantage. moral intuition, however fleeting it may be. Quentin, as Caddy's descendant, represents the next generation of Compsons in a more corrupt version of his mother. Through Benjy's consciousness and his contemporary memory of Caddy, the reader realizes the parallel situation of Quentin, caught by Benjy on the swing with his lover. Instead of producing moral shame with his eyes like Caddy's, Benjy only makes Quentin and his lover uncomfortable. The impact of his vision is then diluted as the Compsons decay, moving away from a spiritual and morally concrete world in which "good" and "bad" are pre-established for people by a society or religion. In a paragraph following Caddy's escape with Benjy, Faulkner writes: Crazy old man, says Quentin. I'll tell Dilsey about how you let him follow me everywhere I go. I'll have you whipped good... "You were snooping after me. Grandma sent you all here to spy on me." She jumped out of the swing...[Quentin's lover] lit a match and put it in her mouth...I opened my mouth. Quentin hit the match with his hand and it went away...Quentin ran towards the house. He walked around the kitchen. (31-32) A few paragraphs down, Luster gives Benjy the contraceptive labeled "Agnes Mabel Becky," which provides initial evidence that Quentin actually has sex in that area, a worse problem than his mother, who loses her virginity years after Benjy. he discovers her in the woods. Once again, though, Benjy's watchful eyes produce the strong initial reaction from Quentin, who asks, "Did Grandma send you all here to spy on me?" His concern comes not from Benjy's innocent gaze, but from a more paranoid and morally bankrupt vision of a world that presupposes bad intent even behind Benjy's actions. Faulkner further reveals his separation from his mother when he runs "around the kitchen," the very place where Caddy finds her moral ground with Benjy. As previously mentioned, Benjy manages to delay Caddy's corruption for a few years, but Quentin leaves the house the next morning with the showman. Therefore, the intensification ofCompson's promiscuity is also accompanied by a diluted ability to find a sense of moral concreteness through Benjy's innocence. The lack of a moral-spiritual basis for the Compson family becomes clear in several ways throughout the book; aside from their ability to ignore Benjy's all-knowing gaze, none of them seem to change their plans on Easter Sunday. Mrs. Compson only complains about not being able to rest even on Sundays, Jason goes so far as to complain about letting servants visit the church, and Quentin sees no problem in running away with his lover. Compson's decay and lack of a moral center coincide well with a lack of spirituality: Faulkner seems to wonder whether one can have a sense of moral concreteness without a spiritual center. Through the Compsons, Faulkner documents the retreat of religion in modern society. Jesus, or Benjy, is nearly omniscient but not omnipotent or capable of influencing the spiritless world in any significant way. Faulkner offers a possible problematic contrast to the Compsons' lack of a spiritual center in Dilsey, the old black servant who fervently believes in the faith. Jesus, even proclaiming "I have seed of the first and of the last" (185), a statement similar to that made by Jesus himself in Revelation 22:13. He uses his voice in the Compson household to defend those in need, particularly the female Quentin, from Jason's irrational rages, thus demonstrating an altruism absent in most of Compson's actions. Faulkner clearly presents her as a romanticized character, able to "feel" religion through the Easter church service, resulting in her aforementioned proclamation. She exudes an aura of strange dignity in Faulkner's first "objective" description of her in chapter four: She wore a stiff black straw hat perched on her turban and a brown velvet cloak trimmed with mangy, nondescript fur over a purple dress . silk, and she stood in the doorway for a while with the myriad of sunken faces raised to the elements... She had once been a large woman, but now her skeleton rose, draped loosely in the unpadded skin... as whether muscle and tissue it had been courage or fortitude that days or years had worn away until only the indomitable skeleton remained standing as a ruin or a landmark...(165) In this passage, Dilsey's worn, but once impressive, velvet and silk costume represents her status as a sort of aging queen, forced into years of hard labor. All the named fabrics and colors evoke this reading: purple silk, brown velvet, and fur, hardly the kind of things even the richest person wears without a certain pomposity. The turban serves to add exoticism, although it is covered by the banal black straw hat: undoubtedly America's imposition on its African past. However, Dilsey's clothing, like the survival of her spirituality in subsequent generations of her family, seems doomed to fail. His fur is "mangy" and his skeleton seems to rise from his flesh as a sign of impending death, the "courage and fortitude" in his body wearing away until he looks like a "ruin or landmark" , objects that represent a fallen person. civilization or lifestyle. The spirituality and moral concreteness represented by Dilsey's "ruin" appear in fact diluted through the generations of his family, although to a lesser extent than the Compsons. Although the whole family goes to church together, signs of similar decay can be detected in Compson in Luster, Dilsey's nephew. He seems to take pleasure in torturing Benjy by saying "Caddy" in his ear or.