Jason's Hard-Knock Life

In order to consider Jason Compson an arch-villain one would first have to consider who the main character of The Sound and the Fury is. This in itself is a fairly tough question considering all of the different viewpoints from which the narrative comes. In my opinion, Caddy is the main character, even though we do not get any information from her viewpoint. Typically, when one thinks of a villain, they think of the character that is in opposition to the main character. I just do not see Jason as being in that much opposition to Caddy. True, Jason does not like Caddy at all, but he is more frustrated with his life in general than with any one particular person. He despises that is stuck working to support his mother and Quentin and a “kitchen full of niggers” (242). He does not understand why Quentin got to go to Harvard while he got stuck working to support the family. Jason is angry at life and takes his anger out on the people around him.

The definition for a villain on dictionary.com is, “A cruelly malicious person who is involved in or devoted to wickedness or crime; scoundrel.” This, to me, does not describe Jason. His harshness and cruelty come from what he considers to be unfairness in his own life. He is not at all “devoted to wickedness or crime.” He is mean because he is unhappy not because he takes pleasure in it. It’s just how he is. His circumstances in life have not allowed him to do things purely for himself and he resents that.

Jason’s chapter adds to its two predecessors by being the most coherent of the three. A lot of things that were hinted at in Benjy’s and Quentin’s chapters are made clearer in Jason’s chapter. Also, Jason’s chapter gives us a different view of Caddy, who is arguably the main character. It is important that we are given a view of Caddy from a sibling who does not like her. Both Benjy and Quentin were very much attached to Caddy and therefore had a clouded perception of her. Jason did not at all share in this attachment and therefore gives us an equally clouded perception, but on the opposite side of the spectrum, allowing us to create a fuller picture of what Caddy was really like.