El Fin

The fourth and final chapter of the book is told from the third person perspective following Dilsey on Easter Sunday in the present (1928). Its story is told more clearly than all the other chapters. To summarize it quickly, Quentin escapes that train wreck of a family in the night and Quentin fails to find her. As for the book as a whole it is basically the same story of the Compson family's ruin as the Old South legacy collides with New South greed and other forms of sin. It is told through four narratives, in a way that the story is essentially repeated four times, and each progressive perspective provides a more clear account (from a mentally handicapped Benjy to a mentally insane Quentin to a heavily biased account from Jason to Dilsey's straightforward conclusion). It seems obvious that this should be representative of some larger concept, but for the life of me I don't know what that is. My first thought is that maybe it just reinforces the idea that the family is falling apart up to the point where there is simply nothing left in the Compson name (by the end of Dilsey's chapter), but I feel like it is likely something deeper than that. Referring to the Macbeth quote, "[life] is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing," maybe the increasing clarity is just telling us that there is something more to this tale. I don't know; I'm just spitballing here. The only thing I can say for certain is that for me, the progressive clarity of the story only makes the story more powerful each time (and a little more boring too). And maybe that's all there is to it. But that does not explain why Benjy seems to be such a clear-cut Christ figure. The family has fully collapsed in the three days before Easter that are covered in the book, and Benjy (at age 33) has suffered the most. My idea is that Benjy is somehow redeeming the legacy of the family, and through it the Old South, after it has been torn apart by Caddy's promiscuity, Jason's greed and rudeness, and Mrs. Compson's complaining and generally poor attitude. Or maybe he is redeeming Caddy, whose actions unintentionally began the process of ruin, but who actually may be one of the only pure-hearted members of the family. Again, I have no idea if this is remotely near the truth. I feel completely out of my league analyzing this book. Thank ye gods it's over.