1. Silence: it is absent present. It values the unsaid and leads us to explore layers of meanings.

Liberates meanings from the authors. It decenters authors. Worth of the unspoken. silencing an
important character. Silencing a weapon of expression. Silencing is a strategy.
2. What is told is less important than what is leads unsaid.
3. In lacanina sense the novel points to the missing center in the novel.
4. W is told is less important than what is leads unsaid.
5. Silence is in the structure of this novel
6.
7. In lacanina sense the novel points to the missing center in the novel.
8.
9.

Faulkner has created an unusual structure in The Sound and the Fury. The first part of the book is the
monologue of Benjy. The second part of the book belongs to Quentin. Jason The fourth and final Dilsey’s
section. In a fragmented way, the story of the Compson family and their tragedy
Faulkner has created an unusual structure in The Sound and the Fury. The first part of the book is the
monologue of Benjy. The second part of the book belongs to Quentin. Jason The fourth and final Dilsey’s
section. In a fragmented way, the story of the Compson family and their tragedy

A Novel About Caddy

In 1933, Faulkner revealed the impulse that moved him to write his first great novel. his desire to create
"a beautiful and tragic little girl," To replace two female absences: the sis-ter he never had and the
daughter he was fated to lose in infancy.' Caddy Compson, then, is the central focus of the novel. As
critics we observe, Caddy is never concretely present in the way that her brothers are.
She is never present
She is never given an interior monologue of her own; she is seen only through the gaze of her brothers,
and even then only in retreat, standing in door-ways, running, vanishing, forever elusive, forever just out
of reach. Caddy seems, then, to be simultaneously absent and present; with her, Faulkner evokes an
absent presence, or the absent center of the novel, as Andre Bleikasten and John T. Matthews have
observed.
The term Absent center
The "absent center" is a key term in Lacanian theory. In order to understand how Caddy's absence, or
repression, supports masculine identity, it is useful briefly to re-view Lacan's account of the origin of
subjectivity. According to Lacan, at first all children are engaged in an imaginary dyadic relation with the
mother in which they find themselves whole. During this period, no clear boundaries exist between the
child and the external world, and the child lacks
Absent Center

The novel center of self. For the child to acquire language, to enter the realm of the symbolic, the child
must become aware of difference. Identity comes about only as a result of difference, only by exclusion.
The appearance of the father establishes sex-ual difference, signified by the phallus, the mark of the
father's difference from the mother. The father creates difference by separating the child from the
maternal body: he prohibits the merging of mother and child and denies the child the use of the phallus to
recreate this union.3 Under the threat of castration, the child represses the desire for unity and wholeness,
opening up the unconscious and creating the subject as lack. The child leaves behind a state of no
difference or lacks and enters the symbolic order which is simultaneously the prohibition of incest with
the mother and the sign system that depends on the absence of the referent.
1. One becomes a speaking subject, then, only through a rupture, only by creating a vacuum where
once there were plenitude and presence.
2. Lacan even uses the word "castration" for the relation of subject to signifier because in the
symbolic order empty discourse, the letter of language, takes the place of authentic existence in
the world.' For this reason, Lacan can say the subject is that which it is not, or, to rephrase Lacan,
the subject exists as a consequence of loss, the loss of the whole from which it arises. And the
whole in relation to which the subject is lacking has its basis in what Freud calls "the phallic
mother."
The "whole" is the relationship with the premedical mother. Paradoxically, however, even as women
represent the whole they also represent lack because the whole with which they are identified threatens to
engulf and dissolve identity.
As Jane Gallop helpfully explains, the maternal body "threatens to undo the achievements of repression
and sublimation, threatens to return the subject to the powerlessness, intensity and anxiety of an
immediate, unmediated connection with the body of the mother." For this reason, then, because women
are reminders of an origin in a lack of differentiation, the male's own sense of

1.1: Obsession
The characters are obsessed about the girl that they just can’t have. This obsession
takes up in this novel. Faulkner uses Caddy’s character to create this effect for us
as readers. We see Quentin longing for Caddy. We see Benjy longing for Caddy.
We see Jason thinking about Caddy. What we don’t see, of course, is Caddy
herself.
She’s the missing center of this novel. That’s our novel without Caddy. We hear so
much about her. We just never actually get up close and personal with the wild,
passionate, loving girl that captured the hearts of all of her family members.

1.2: Faulkner’s Obsession

Interestingly, she captured Faulkner’s heart, too. When he talked about The Sound
and the Fury later in his career, he called Caddy his "heart’s darling." She’s the
image that generated his novel. And the sense of loss that we feel as readers – that
nagging feeling that there must be something that could make this novel make
sense – is what’s left in the wake of her absence. It’s what’s left by the end of the
novel, as well. Mrs. Compson won’t even let Caddy’s name be spoken in her
house, remember

1.3: Missing center

So, how do we talk about a character that pulls a major disappearing act? she’s
fearless as a child. Of course, she also offers up a pretty good foreshadowing of her
fate in this scene (play ominous foreshadowing music here). Declaring, "I’ll run
away and never come back," Caddy threatens to do exactly what she wants
whenever she wants to – and to hell with the consequences (1.212).Of all the
Compson children, Caddy and Benjy are the most comfortable in their bodies. Just
as Benjy depends on bodily sensations to tell him about the world around him,
Caddy depends upon the pleasures of her body to lead her into a new world of
experiences. Unfortunately, these experiences quickly become more than she can
control. As she explains to Quentin: "There was something terrible in me
sometimes at night I could see it grinning at me I could see it through them
grinning at me through their faces it's gone now and I'm sick" (2.214).Sexual
desire becomes a reflection of her own consuming desires, not necessarily a
desire for another person. Fascinated by Dalton Ames, Caddy starts a relationship
with him and quickly becomes pregnant. Her pregnancy, the death knell of the
family (if you ask Mrs. Compson, anyway), serves as the reason for a quick and
unhappy marriage to a skeezy guy who works in a bank.

1. 1.3: Total absence

2. Herbert Head even sounds like a tool. After her marriage, she effectively
disappears from the novel. As we said, she’s persona non grata (totally
unwelcome) at the House of Compson.
3. All that’s left, then, are Benjy’s memories of Caddy as the girl who "smelled
like trees" and Quentin’s obsessive convictions that he can clear all of
Caddy’s sins by convincing their father that they’ve committed incest.
4. It’s not the most stellar legacy, we grant you.
5. But then again, Faulkner never really lets her choose her own fate. Sure, we
know he likes her a lot. But we never get to hear much of her side of the
story. The one time that she does explain her sexual activity to Quentin, she
does it through her body, by getting Quentin to feel her pulse when she hears
the words "Dalton Ames." And let’s face it: that sort of communication is pretty
hard to translate into a novel. After all, novels are about language, words. And
Caddy isn’t always so good at using words. For a "heart’s darling," she sure
gets the short end of the stick
6. Character Analysis Caddy
7. One approach to The Sound and the Fury  is by evaluating each brother's relationship to Caddy. We
have no direct view of her — only the reports of Benjy, Quentin, and Jason. From these reports, we
have to judge what type of person she actually was.

In our earliest view of Caddy, we see her at the branch as a rather daring young girl. who
searches for the truth and reality of any situation.

Caddy must also function as a type of mother. Even in the early scenes, Mr. Compson asks
Caddy to look after Benjy because Mrs. Compson is sick. As a consequence, Benjy develops a
strong love and need for Caddy. She replaces the love that is denied him by his own mother.
Whenever Mrs. Compson tries to correct Benjy, it is only Caddy who can quiet Benjy. She even
sends her mother upstairs "so you can be sick." Caddy, at a very early age, has to perform the
functions of a mother.

1.3: Rebel against1.3: family Traditions

As Caddy grows older, she sees through the neurotic whining of mother and the weakness and
cynicism of her father. She feels the need to reject this artificial world and look for some way to
reject everything concerned with the Compson world. She later admits that she does not love the
men with whom she has sex, and she also says that she made them have sex with her. Why?
Caddy's actions are deliberate forms of rejection. She has seen through the false concept of honor
and the superficiality of the entire so-called aristocratic world. She becomes the complete realist,
someone who simply cannot tolerate the hypocrisy and artificiality and false pride of the
Compsons; therefore, she turns to unorthodox behavior in an attempt to assert her own
independence and individuality.

When Quentin offers suicide or incest to her, Caddy is willing to do either of these because either
act would be a strong act of rejection. She believes that there is a curse on the entire Compson
family, and, therefore, she is willing to attempt any violation of order (even incest or suicide) in
order to escape from the horror of the Compson world. Her acts are performed in an attempt to
assert her own individuality against a mother and father who have essentially rejected her or
have, in some way,

42 DISCOURSE ANALYSIS AS THEORY AND METHOD

Lacan's Theory of the Subject

Lacan also understands the subject as a perpetually incomplete structure. It strives to become a
whole.' Lacan's theory begins with the infant. The infant lives in symbiosis with the mother and
the world around it. Gradually, the infant becomes detached from the mother but retains the
memory of a feeling of completeness.

Generally, the condition of the subject is the perpetual striving to become whole again. Through
socialisation, the child is presented with discursive images of 'who it is' and what identity it has.
The subject comes to know itself as an individual by identifying with something outside itself,
that is, with the images presented to it.

The child constantly feels that he or she does not quite fit the images. So the images are basis of
alienation. They are compared to the infant's feeling of wholeness, but they never quite match it.

Therefore, the subject is fundamentally split. Lacan speaks of 'the self's radical ex-centricity to
itself with which man is confronted' (Lacan 1977a: 171): , the feeling of wholeness fails to
emerge.

The conclusion
Jacques Lacan on how the self comes into being.
The child's first separation from the mother is the
Mirror Stage, when the child first sees itself as
bodily separate, producing a false sense of
wholeness. When we are one with our mother, we
are in the state of whole-ness. Throughout life, we
long for a return to this wholeness. But wholeness
will always elude us. He also calls it the Other, all
that world beyond the self. To be the Other would be
to bridge the separation that exists between the self
and the center.

Because such an act is not possible, the human being

experiences an ongoing "lack," which Lacan calls
"desire," an unsatisfiable yearning.

the text depicts the human being as a fragmented,

incomplete being.
 In "Young Goodman Brown," for example,
evidence of the three orders points to lack and
absence that make wholeness impossible.

The protagonist longs for the wholeness, but it

eludes him. He does not know and can never know
the true "self," and he resists the acceptance of
society's rules, the power of the group. Clearly
suffering from a loss that he can never recover, he
exemplifies the fragmented being who is unable to
achieve the completeness he desires.