Family dysfunction in August Osage County and The Sound and Fury

Abstract

In contrast to the chaos we see in August Osage County is Dilsey’s sense of temporal order and the grounding that she derives from her religion in The Sound and the Fury. In the Quentin section we had seen that time was the mausoleum of all hope and desire and the brothers are all caught up in a past in which Caddy had not lost her innocence and virginity and betrayed the family name. Dilsey in contrast thinks not in terms of the past but a redemptive future in which Christ will come and redeem believers all from their fragmented existences and bring them back to his abode in Paradise- a future she looks forward to in contrast to all the ruin and fragments and bondage to the past that the members of this dysfunctional family experience.