in modern society, as subject to external forces stronger than the family itself, and as bound to the past and the sins of the past. Faulkner also presents this disintegration in terms of classical tragedy within the form of the novel. The most important element in the novel is time, and the way each of the characters reacts to time is linked to the underlying themes and to the decay of the family unit. The novel is structured in four sections, with each section told from a different point of view, and with each representing a different view of time. The opening section is from the point of view of Benjy, and his muddled mind mixes past and present freely in a stream-of-consciousness method mirroring his own retarded mind while also exposing links across generations. There are verbal cues to the reader to show the different changes in time, but there are also deliberately introduced confusions showing how close past and present can be--there are two Quentins, for instance, two Jasons, two Maurys, and Benjy has had two different names--first Maury and then Benjy. For Benjy, all time is the present, and events from different eras mix together.
The second section is that of the male Quentin, so tied to the past that he has no life in the present at all. His section exists in the past, having stopped on June 2, 1910 with his suicide. Benjy always returned to scenes of the past because he could not tell the difference between them and the present, while Quentin returns to scenes of the past because the past holds him in its grip. His family history is vitally important to him. The Compson
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