Benjy Compson and Sonny

"Somebody is shaking me but I dont want get up now, because I'm tired and I'm sleepy and I don't want get up now" (Bloodline 3). So begins Gaines' short story "A Long Day in November," a story narrated by five-year-old Sonny. The boy tells about the relationship between his father and mother, their conflicts then their eventual reconciliation. For this post, I do not want to focus on the narrative of the story. Instead, I want to talk briefly about the narrative voice that Gaines constructs to tell the story.

Reading Sonny's voice for the first time, I could not help but think that something felt eerily similar to me. As I kept reading, I finally began to figure out that Sonny's narration reminded me of Benjy Compson's from William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. In fact, a couple of pages into "A Long Day in November," I scribbled "kinda like Benjy narrating" in the margins. Specifically, what sparked this connection came from Sonny's narration when describes his dream the waking up from it. There are not clues that Sonny awakes. The narration moves fluidly from sleeping dreams of Billy Joe Martin, Sonny, and Lucy playing to "Somebody's beating on the door. Mama, somebody's beating on the door" (7). Sonny's seamless movement from sleep to being awake is not as abrupt as Benjy's leaps over the course of thirty years, but it is similar. Along with this type of subtle shift, Sonny also takes on some of Benjy's linguistic style.

Even though Benjy is thirty three, his decreased mental capacity makes him appear as if he is merely a child. For example, he can only mumble and cry when he hears Caddy's named mentioned. In fact, the family doesn't even say her name when she is gone so Benjy will keep quiet. Opening his section, Benjy states, "Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming towards where the flag was and I went along the fence" (3). Just like Sonny's initial sentence, Benjy's contains a simplicity, even though both also have a subordinate clause. Their apparent simplicity arises from the structure (a subject followed directly by a verb). This structure allows both Sonny and Benjy to sound like a five-year-old boy and a thirty-three year old man child respectively.

Responding to a question about writing from the point of view of a young boy in "A Long Day in November," Gaines responded by saying "we have all been children once" and because of that, the viewpoint is there somewhere. Even though this voice resided within Gaines, and us, he had to find out a way to bring it out. To do that, he received help from both Joyce and Faulkner. Joyce helped Gaines write about events that span a day. From Faulkner, Gaines said he found out how to write in the voice of a five-year-old Sonny.

In the first part of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury the Benjy part, Benjy uses the simplest terms to express his feelings: "the gate is cold," "the fire is good," "I stamped my shoes on," all this sort of thing. This childlike section is so convincing that I really fell in love with it. I really did. (Fitzgerald and Marchant 11)    

I am in the process of rereading The Sound and the Fury, so in a couple of days I may have more to say about the novel and Gaines. However, at this point, I just wanted to note the similarities in regards to the way that Gaines structures Sonny's narration and the way Faulkner structures Benjy's. If you have any comments or questions, remember to leave them below. 

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage, 1994. Print.
Fitzgerald, Gregory and Peter Marchant. "An Interview: Ernest J. Gaines." Conversations with Ernest Gaines. Ed. John Lowe. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995. 3-15. Print.
Gaines, Ernest J. "A Long Day in November." Bloodline. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1976. 3-79. Print.