# The Sound and the Fury — Character guide

> Key figures in The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner.

- [Benjy Compson](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_sound_and_the_fury_se/characters/benjy_compson.md): Benjy is the youngest Compson son, cared for by the family's Black servants and treated by his mother as both a burden and a permanent child. He has no language but an almost unbearable sensitivity to order and loss: he 
- [Quentin Compson](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_sound_and_the_fury_se/characters/quentin_compson.md): Quentin is the eldest Compson son, sent north to Harvard on money the family can barely spare, and he is consumed by his sister Caddy's sexuality and his own inability to protect or possess her. His father has taught him
- [Jason Compson IV](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_sound_and_the_fury_se/characters/jason_compson_iv.md): Jason runs the Compson household after his father's death, managing his mother's complaints, his niece's truancy, and the family store with the same sour efficiency. He believes he was cheated out of a job and a fortune,
- [Caddy Compson](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_sound_and_the_fury_se/characters/caddy_compson.md): Caddy is the center of her brothers' emotional lives: Benjy's comfort, Quentin's obsession, Jason's grievance. As a girl she climbs trees to see into funerals, smells like trees to Benjy, and promises to take care of him
- [Dilsey Gibson](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_sound_and_the_fury_se/characters/dilsey_gibson.md): Dilsey has worked for the Compsons for decades, raising the children, managing the kitchen, and absorbing Mrs. Compson's complaints without either breaking or pretending. She is the one who dresses Benjy, feeds the house
- [Mr. Compson](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_sound_and_the_fury_se/characters/jason_compson_iii.md): Mr. Compson is a lawyer who has stopped practicing, a father who lectures his sons on the futility of honor, and a husband who has long since retreated from his wife's anxieties into whiskey and quotation. He gives Quent
- [Caroline Compson](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_sound_and_the_fury_se/characters/caroline_compson.md): Caroline Compson presides over the family from her quilted dressing gown, calling Dilsey's name from the head of the stairs and mourning the burdens her children have become. She clings to her Bascomb pride and her sense
- [Luster](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_sound_and_the_fury_se/characters/luster.md): Luster works the Compson kitchen under Dilsey's sharp hand, fetching wood, dodging blame, and minding Benjy through the long present-day Saturday. He is boyish and evasive, innocent-faced when caught in the cellar, yet t
- [Maury Bascomb](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_sound_and_the_fury_se/characters/maury_bascomb.md): Uncle Maury drifts through the Compson house as a dependent whose Bascomb name outranks his usefulness, meddling in family quarrels and borrowing against others' patience. His presence sharpens the family's decay: he is 
- [Versh](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_sound_and_the_fury_se/characters/versh.md): Versh belongs to the earlier generation of Dilsey's family, the one that raised the Compson children while their own mother kept to her room. In the childhood sections he is the steady presence who buttons coats, warns a
- [T.P.](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_sound_and_the_fury_se/characters/tp.md): T.P. drives the family buggy and manages Benjy on the fraught journeys of the past, his casual competence a foil to the Compsons' agitation. He is young, watchful, and already practiced at handling other people's crises,
- [Shreve MacKenzie](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_sound_and_the_fury_se/characters/shreve_mackenzie.md): Shreve shares Quentin's Cambridge room, padding across the floor in slippers while Quentin lies listening to his grandfather's watch. He is genial, unhaunted, and largely uncomprehending of the Southern obsessions Quenti
- [Miss Quentin](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_sound_and_the_fury_se/characters/miss_quentin.md): She lives as the Compsons' ward, a girl whose mother's name is spoken only in whispers and whose schooling, manners, and whereabouts Jason monitors like a debt ledger. Cornered over skipped school and a forged report car
- [Uncle Job](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_sound_and_the_fury_se/characters/uncle_job.md): An elderly black man working for the Compsons.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_sound_and_the_fury_se/characters