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Faulkner's Caddy DOUGLAS B. HILL, JR. There are no extraneous characters in fiction. As far as the structure of a novel is concerned, every character depends upon every other. If a novelist accepts this condition as a challenge to his ingenuity, his work can take any number of directions. Dickens's method in a book like BleakHouse - the arranging of dozens of characters into a structure so contrived that the least movement of the least significant of them causes it to topple into a new equilibrium - is one remarkable elaboration of the principle. What William Faulkner does with the Compson family in The Sound and the Fury, though accomplished with fewer actors, is no less remarkable. Readers of that work quickly become aware of the centrality of Caddy Compson to the complex structure that Faulkner has built. The novel revolves about her, focuses itself upon her. She never appears in the flesh, in the actual present time of any part of the book (unless Benjy's consciousness can be said to operate always in present time); yet in the way she is made to control the substance of each brother's narrative life, she gives each one, as a character and as a narrator, his reason for existence. It is as if Faulkner had determined to make Caddy the sole source of both human and structural energy in The Sound and the Fury, and proceeded to build his novel upon that plan. Most readers would agree that The Sound andthe Fury is not only intellectually stimulating but also, once its complexities have been met and absorbed, emotionally moving. Artifice abounds, but there is no effect of sterility, of mere brilliance. Faulkner's experiments with narrative consciousness and temporal order excite more than academic admiration. The reader feels he is involved with characters and with a human situation of great poignance, not just with a series of toursdeforce. How, precisely, does this come about? How does the reader move, or how is he led, from the technique to the emotion? We can begin with two assumptions. The first is that the reader's emotional response to Caddy Compson is the measure of his emotional response to the novel. The second is that this response is essentially irrational, formed by the reader's predisposition to accept uncritically the images and attitudes that the author presents to him, rather than examine them for what they actually are, or for what they may mean. This situation is complicated, as is our attempt to understand it, by the fact that Faulkner has given Caddy to the reader simultaneously as two types of literary experience. She is a human character, approached by the author from several different directions, and also by the reader, who puts THE CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES VOL. VII, NO. 1, SPRING 1976 his own preconceptions into his perception of her. She is at the same time a functional character and an element in the structure and sequence of the novel, a figure in the patterns that these make. It is to the first of these figures that the reader assumes he is responding: what we should observe is how the various images of the second figure both complement and confuse this response. If we can explore and then chart the connections between these two kinds of stimuli to the imagination, we should be able to understand some of the ways that Caddy, and through her the novel, work upon the reader. We have to start with Caddy's place in the structure of the novel in order to get beyond it. We have to recognize, and understand the implications of, the differences between Faulkner's presentation of Caddy in the narrative and his presentation of Benjy, Quentin, and Jason. Each of the three brothers, as Faulkner has him create a character for himself through his distinctive first-person discourse, creates as well a character for Caddy. She does not define herself at all: she appears only in the recorded consciousness of each brother, and the reader has no first-person account of her own thoughts and perceptions. In this sense we can say that she is for the reader, for...

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