What happens in Chapter 4 of The Sound and the Fury?
The novel's final section focuses on Dilsey Gibson, the Black matriarch who has kept the Compson household intact amid its long decline. On Easter Sunday morning, Dilsey wakes up before dawn, dresses warmly, and starts her usual tasks—stoking the fire, making breakfast, and managing the chaos of a household that can no longer function on its own. Jason has found out that Quentin, his niece, has taken back the money he had been secretly stealing from her mother's checks and has run away with a carnival man. In a fit of rage, Jason rushes off in pursuit, battling a severe headache that ultimately overwhelms him. Meanwhile, Dilsey takes Benjy and her grandson Luster to the Easter service at her small Black church, where the visiting Reverend Shegog delivers a sermon that deeply moves the congregation—and Dilsey—to tears. On their way home, Luster takes Benjy along the usual carriage route but accidentally turns the wrong way at the Confederate monument; Benjy's howling only stops when Jason, returning humiliated from his failed chase, corrects their direction. The novel ends with Benjy, peaceful once more, watching the world flow by in its "ordered" sequence—a tranquility that is entirely superficial, entirely borrowed.
Analysis
Faulkner's craft in this section showcases deliberate contrast and a sense of quiet devastation. After three chapters filled with fractured interiority—Benjy's associative loops, Quentin's spiraling rhetoric, and Jason's bitter sarcasm—the prose shifts to a clear, compassionate, and elegiac third-person omniscient voice. This tonal shift feels like surgery: the reader finally takes a breath, only to realize that the air is thick with grief.
Dilsey serves as the novel's moral center precisely because she lacks the interiority granted to the Compson men. Faulkner portrays her through her actions and endurance instead of through stream of consciousness, a choice that serves as both a tribute and a structural irony—the one character who truly sees is the one the novel doesn't allow us to fully understand.
The Easter setting carries significant weight. Shegog's sermon collapses time in a way that mirrors Benjy's section but flips its meaning: while Benjy's timelessness represents trauma, Shegog's embodies transcendence. The preacher's voice shifts from "level and cold" to a raw, almost primal cry, enacting the very dissolution of ego that the Compson men pursue in a destructive manner.
The monument scene at the end offers Faulkner's final irony: restored order is really imposed order. Benjy's calm relies on a world that moves in a single, predetermined direction—a metaphor for the South's insistence on a fixed, backward-looking orientation. The "cornice and facade" imagery in the novel's last line frames the Compson house as a ruin pretending to be stable, with beauty that is purely superficial and ultimately false.
Key quotes from Chapter 4
“They endured.”
The novel's most cited three words, offered by Faulkner in his appendix and echoed in the section's cumulative portrait of Dilsey, distilling her entire characterization into a single, unadorned verb.
“I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin.”
Dilsey speaks through tears after Reverend Shegog's Easter sermon, the only character in the novel granted a clear-eyed view of the Compson family's full arc of destruction.
“The broken flower drooped over Ben's fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and facade flowed smoothly once more from left to right, post and tree, window and doorway and signboard each in its ordered place.”
The novel's closing image, in which Benjy's peace is restored the moment the carriage resumes its familiar direction around the Confederate monument, yoking idyllic calm to rigid, backward-looking order.
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Create an accountSign inVocabulary in Chapter 4
- serene
- Calm, peaceful, and undisturbed; here describing Benjy's expression when the familiar order of his world is restored after a moment of panic.
- cornice
- A decorative horizontal molding that runs along the top edge of a building's exterior wall, just below the roofline.
- facade
- The front face of a building, especially one that is ornamental; here it is part of the passing streetscape that Benjy watches from the moving carriage.
- endured
- Suffered through hardship and kept going without giving up; Faulkner uses this single word to sum up Dilsey's lifelong strength in the face of the family's ruin.
- matriarch
- A woman who holds authority and acts as the central, stabilizing figure of a household or community, often through age, strength, or moral force.
- stoking
- Adding fuel to a fire and tending it so it burns strongly; here part of Dilsey's early-morning routine of keeping the household running.
- seed
- Dialect past tense of 'saw,' meaning 'I saw' or 'I have seen'; used in Dilsey's speech to reflect the vernacular of Black Southerners in early twentieth-century Mississippi.
- de
- Dialect spelling of 'the,' used throughout Dilsey's dialogue to represent the pronunciation patterns of her Southern Black vernacular speech.
- en
- Dialect spelling of 'and,' used in Dilsey's speech to capture the sound of her Southern vernacular pronunciation.