Dilsey

Although Faulkner limits Dilsey's entry to "They endured" (343), his placement of Dilsey and her family members, the Gibsons, after the Compsons in the "Appendix" does not reflect merely their secondary status in the household. The Gibsons are the ones who will survive the crumbling of the Compson legacy. Each member of Dilsey's family is described as enjoying a life of entertainment and family far from Jefferson. It is appropriate that Faulkner put "They endured" beneath Dilsey's name, because she is the force that drives her family forward, maintaining her household despite rapidly changing circumstances in the Compson family and society at large. When Melissa Meek visits the elderly Dilsey in Memphis, where Dilsey lives with her daughter, Dilsey is described as having been "a big woman once, in faded clean calico and an immaculate turban wound round her head above the bleared and now apparently almost sightless eyes" (336). Although the librarian wants Dilsey to confirm that Caddy is the woman in the magazine clipping, Dilsey relies not on her sight, but rather on her knowledge of the Compson family, in rejecting the effort; she knows that the Compson man's word is needed for something to be recognized as true, no matter what her own senses tell her. Dilsey's endurance is, therefore, a much-mitigated victory, but she gets the last entry, and the lasting one, in the "Appendix."