Caddy and Quentin, Sitting in a Tree...

We have already spent nearly an entire class period discussing how troubling and puzzling the last two pages to The Sound and the Fury are. Now, however, I find myself in the much more difficult position of arguing the opposite: how the ending in fact provides resolution. The first thing that comes to mind is the beautiful paralleled imagery of the pear tree. At the beginning of the novel, Caddy climbs up the pear tree to the window of her room. In fact, this image was Faulkner’s conception of the novel—he built the rest around this image. At the end, Quentin, Caddy’s daughter, who sleeps in the same room that Caddy did when she was a girl, escapes out the very same window, down the very same pear tree. When Jason and Mrs. Compson enter her room, they see that “The window was open. A pear tree grew there, close against the house.” And, the tree “brought into the room the forlorn scent of the blossoms.” Both of these images explicitly force the reader to recall Caddy’s relationship with Benjy, perhaps the central storyline of The Sound and the Fury. The scent of blossoms, of course, is how Benjy recognized Caddy, and the lack thereof was how he knew that she had lost her virginity. Faulkner beautifully ties together the entire novel, because when she lost her virginity, she gave birth to Quentin, who now causes the rest of the family to once again take note of the pear tree and its smell. In this way, Faulkner resolves the novel enough to show that the downfall of the Compsons continues, and in fact is now complete.