The Sound and the Fury: Similes 6 key examples

In this passage, Faulkner writes the simile “it was like a door”—but then, by stating “only it wasn’t a door,” he directly explains that the simile is figurative rather than real. At first glance, this defeats the purpose of a simile. Similes operate as a mutual understanding between author and reader that the comparison exists to enhance understanding, not as a literal fact. But here Faulkner breaks that contract by explaining himself.

This technique is a comment on Benjy’s consciousness—he doesn’t understand the way figurative language ought to operate, and instead simply narrates how he would like to. It can also be read as an explanation for the lack of figurative language throughout this first part: Benjy speaks his mind, rather than trying to follow rules of literary devices. But it's also a comment on the power of figurative language. By watching Benjy perform a simile and then analyze the way it doesn’t quite capture reality, readers watch a gap open up between the language of the simile and the language of reality and can observe this gap become useful to Benjy’s understanding of the setting of the library. Benjy recognizes a comparison to something (a door), then recognizes that what he sees is not, in fact, a door; but both he and the reader are better off for having made the comparison. Even in this context, figurative language can be more effective than literal description to convey the truth of a setting or scenario. 

To Benjy, Caddy’s hair is like fire, and there is fire in her eyes. Two kinds of figurative language are used consecutively in the same sentence with the same referent (fire), as if there is no distinction between them. This lack of distinction matches the broader pattern of indiscriminateness in Benjy’s narration and his consciousness. Just as literary devices and parts of speech operate as identical, the past and the present blur together throughout the part, and various senses combine into a synesthetic whole. This general blurring is disorienting to readers at first, but by the end of the part it’s also recognizable as truly beautiful. This line is no exception.

In fact, this passage is broadly an arc towards eliminating distinctions. In Benjy’s character description in the appendix, Faulkner writes that he "loved three things: the pasture which was sold to pay for Candace's wedding and to send Quentin to Harvard, his sister Candace, firelight." Benjy loves the fire, and he loves Caddy; in his mind and the figurative language of the final passage of his part, he fuses them. Faulkner’s language in the appendix does the same: the phrase “Candace, firelight” suggests that firelight is simply another way to describe Caddy, as opposed to “Candace, and firelight,” which he could have written. In this final scene, Benjy also clambers into his father’s lap and is held by Caddy so all three of them are in contact. Broadly, this passage reveals Benjy’s beautiful tendency to eliminate edges and divisions—and demonstrates that this tendency also emerges in his language. 

This simile, which compares “the best of thought” to “dead ivy vines upon old dead brick,” considers the past to be something deteriorating and deceased, unable to last the trials of time. It reveals key information about Quentin and his father: both consider their family to have been great at some time, like the brick of great buildings, but now to be in decline, like the dead ivy clinging to ruins. In part, this is because of the fall of certain institutions: the Compson family, to Quentin and his father the “best of thought,” relied upon the social structures of the South in the 1800s, particularly slavery, to maintain their greatness. Now, as those institutions and their legacies decline, they simply cling to their remains. The imagery of this simile also matches the aesthetic of Ivy-league Harvard, itself a pillar of a different kind of institution; Quentin’s father’s words could be taken as an insult to Harvard, a way of calling it obsolete.

Quentin’s response to this simile is perhaps the most important part of this passage. To him, the decline of institutions and the matching fall of his heritage triggers an immense sadness over the fact of repetition. Despite his family’s fall from grace, he and his siblings must go on. He lives in the shadow of the past and feels it is a tragedy to continue living after one’s family has peaked. This sadness is a core characteristic of Quentin’s identity, and, eventually, a factor in his suicide. 

This piece of figurative language operates on multiple levels. First, it matches the setting: Quentin meets the girl in a bakery, where coffee fits in nicely. Second, the language of the simile describes the girl as open, kind, and slightly vapid, a blank of a face turned toward him inscrutably. It’s notable that the first thing Quentin describes about her is her skin color—“milky” but with a “dash” of “coffee”—given his obsession with race and various kinds of what he considers purity. The girl is eventually revealed to be Italian, which Quentin seems to notice immediately and fastidiously. Yet he is kind to her: he helps her buy bread from the suspicious bakery owner. And third, it is fitting for this line to include a simile, which compares two unlike things, because in the end of this part it seems as if Quentin kidnapped the girl, even though he didn’t: the scenario appears to be one thing when in fact it is another. 

This stark and unkind simile, which compares Luster and Benjy to a caged bear and monkey, reveals much more about Jason than about either Luster or Benjy. Jason directly dehumanizes them both: he considers them no better than animals. He implies that he holds this belief for two reasons. One, they inconvenience Jason's life, which he resents; and two, he has a fundamental prejudice against them because Luster is Black and Benjy is mentally disabled. This simile clarifies sharply that Jason is explicitly racist and ableist. This kind of sentence is also a major reason Jason’s segment is perhaps the most difficult to read.

This is also an archetypal course of Jason's thoughts. First, he perceives other people only as inconveniences to him; second, he feels intense resentment of that fact; and third, he consoles himself by lashing out at those people. He wants to depict them as beneath him in order to cling to his own sense of superiority. Ironically, in reaching for some kind of self-worth or dignity, he abandons it by succumbing to bitterness and prejudice.

And, on the same page, two more of these double similes to describe two jaybirds:

A pair of jaybirds came up from nowhere, whirled up on the blast like gaudy scraps of cloth or paper and lodged in the mulberries, where they swung in raucous tilt and recover, screaming into the wind that ripped their harsh cries onward and away like scraps of paper or cloth in turn.

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This new innovation in the language of the book matches the message of this final section. The fourth part is in large part a way of opening up the book to wider possibilities: Dilsey realizes that although the Compson family has been dominant in Jefferson and in her own life for so long, their history is declining, and the future could hold many new possibilities. In other words, the present gestures to the past or the future; the hopeful or the hopeless. From the outset of this segment, Faulkner ingrains this dual thinking into his language. In reading these doubled similes, readers can understand the book as either a decline or a new beginning, a ruin or a landmark, something to mourn or something to celebrate. 

This takeaway is key to Dilsey's perspective on the events of the novel. But, because this is the first time Faulkner has used the third person, it also can be read as key to his own perspective. Though much of the novel has been painful and pessimistic up until this point, here Faulkner allows hope into his own outlook—and, through his figurative language, holds it out to his reader.