One Shameful, the Other Suicidal: Caddy’s and Quentin’s Eros and Thanatos in The Sound and the Fury Chloe Mandel 12th Grade

In William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the Compson family experiences a downward spiral accelerated mainly by two of the novel’s central characters: Caddy and Quentin Compson. Caddy’s sexuality, pregnancy, and banishment from the Compson home devastate her family members, while Quentin’s suicide effectively ruins the prospect of a bright future for a Compson sibling. Caddy and Quentin’s actions are governed by the forces of Eros and Thanatos, and both siblings experience an imbalance between the two in their later lives.

Caddy conveys Eros in both her carefree nature and vitality as a girl and her sensual desires as a teenager, but her promiscuity is driven by an impulse to act out against her family members, representing Thanatos. Caddy’s death instinct dominates following her baby’s birth when, burdened by the shame of her actions, she exchanges the uninhibited passion of her teenage sexual encounters for the conscious self-destruction of prostitution. On the other hand, Quentin’s Thanatos instinct overwhelms his Eros instinct throughout his life, largely due to his inability to protect his sister’s innocence. Quentin is not only unsuccessful in understanding or preventing the sexual aspect of Caddy’s Eros, but also in...