The first is that when faced with loud noises, such as his mother crying, his immediate response is to become upset. Then the cushion came back/She led me to the fire and I looked at the bright, smooth shapes. In the following passage, he displays two signs of autistic behavior: “but I didn’t stop and mother caught me in her arms and began to cry and I cried. But Benjy’s so-called illnesses are actually divine gifts that let him perceive the world through an enlightened eye.īenjy’s narrative evinces how someone with autism experiences the world, most specifically through sound. By labeling Benjy as someone who struggles with mental illnesses such as autism and synesthesia as an “idiot” we are defining him using our own man-made standards. Faulkner uses Benjy Compson, a character who lives outside man-made constructs such as time, race, and morality in order to show that these constructs are just that: man-made theories that have no impact on the natural occurrences of the world and its day to day movements. For example: being able to taste numbers or feel colors. Synesthesia itself is also a disorder, caused by a neuropsychological trait where the stimulation of one sense causes the automatic experience of another. Autism is a developmental disorder most often characterized by impairments in forming normal social relationships and impairments in being able to communicate with others. To see the world through Benjy’s eyes, you must be part of a very exclusive club with a two prong membership: that of autism and that of synesthesia. The character of Benjy Compson from William Faulkner’s 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury is a mythic and Christ-like figure with the divine gift of prophecy rather than the retarded man-child that the other characters in the novel view him to be.
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