y and collectively, within the family circle and with reference to the family circle's place in Yoknapatawpha county. The entire novel begins as a tale told by the family idiot Benjy and continues as characters alternately fret (Benjy, Quentin, Mrs. Compson) and strut (Jason, Caddy) through life, or are so to speak heard no more (Caddy), never resolving the family's past and therefore continually haunted by it, continually attached to it, and at the same time continually seeking a way out of it. Dilsey, their black maid, counters the family's dangerous poison and offers a steady presence that absorbs the ghosts of the Compsons' slaveholding past and offers hope for the future. How this is worked out in the novel can be seen with reference to the shape that the ghosts assume for those who are haunted.
As a family, the Compsons haunted by the collective memory of the Civil War in the South. The Compsons have an anachronistic attachment to antebellum land in the midst of modernizing and industrializing 20th-century America. Old-fashioned Southern charm in the form of the Quentin would like to live haunts the specter of industrial reality and the squalid naturalism in which Jason does live. The spectre of racism and the legacy of slavery are a part of this; symbolic of this presence for the Compsons is of Dilsey, who knows both where the bodies are buried and who buried them, and who is less fooled than his own brothers and sisters by Jason.
In sickly Mrs. Compson, the haunting takes the form of a failure to reach the real world. She clings to the chimera of a genteel Southern heritage in every waking moment. Having been rather disgusted by elder Jason while he was alive, she clings to his memory when he dies, and always in a self-absorbed way. Indeed, she turns the haunting reality of Quentin's suicide into a statement about her special place in a divine plan.
"What reason did Quentin have? Under God's heaven what reason did he ha...