Benjamin Compson

The fourth and youngest child of Jason and Caroline Compson is initially named Maury, in honor of "his mother's only brother" (340). But after "his mother realised what he was," i.e. cognitively disabled, she insisted his name be changed. His brother Quentin "rechristened" him Benjamin, and the "Appendix" gives a sense for Quentin's rationale: "(Benjamin, our lastborn, sold into Egypt)" (340). Benjamin shares his Biblical namesake's role as the one who is to suffer for the foolishness of the others of his family. Benjamin is characterized by his loves: for firelight, for the pasture that was once part of the Compson property, and especially for his sister Caddy. In The Sound and the Fury (1929), Benjy (as he is more typically referred to in the novel) reacts to the loss of his sister by accosting a girl coming home from school, as Caddy used to do; the representation of this event in the "Appendix" echoes his brother Jason's view in reading the incident as "a fumbling abortive attempt by his idiot brother on a passing female child" (339). Under Jason's cruel guardianship, Benjy is castrated ("gelded," 341) in 1913, and sent to the State Asylum in Jackson in 1933.