Compson Inset: Gate (Location Key)

In The Sound and the Fury the metal gate that separates the Compson house from the street that runs past it and into town has been kept locked since Benjy was a child so that he cannot 'escape.' But he regularly goes down to the gate, first to wait for the young Caddy coming home from school (6), then, after she grows up and marries, to watch other school girls going past the house on their way home. This gate is accidentally left unlocked one day when Benjy is about seventeen years old, allowing him to get into the street where he tries to talk to a young girl named Burgess. She lives nearby, close enough for her father to respond to the sight of the hulking adolescent grabbing his daughter by attacking Benjy with a fence picket (263). Even after this traumatic event, however, Benjy keeps going down to the gate. As T.P. says, "He think if he down to the gate, Miss Caddy come back" (51).