Closure?

Inside the inverted reality of Faulkner's literary design, the Sound and the Fury examines the steady decline of the Compson family, a metaphorical parallel to the diminishment of the Southern Aristocratic era. The self-centeredness of Mother, Father, and Jason wither any hope for a strong familial bond in the future; the embarassment that the Compsons find in Benji damages any hope to maintain the facade of a flawless Southern family; the sexual promiscuity of Caddy sullies the Compson name beyond repair; the suicide of Quentin, the first born son, casts an permanent shadow upon outsiders' perceptions of the once noble family. The Compsons have reached a dead end. With three physically or mentally sterile sons and one banished daughter, the Compson family has nowhere to go but to fade away into the absolute silence of a defeated family lineage.

And such is the final impression of the Sound and the Fury. Quentin's escape compounds with Mother's melodrama, which compounds to Jason's bitterness and fury--loudness, anger, red, pain, distrust, synicism, sadness, change?, the end. These components conjoin and are symbolized by Benji unprecedentedly loud and mournful bellering. And then--silence.

This silence, the silence that ensues the end of Benji's hollering, provides closure to Faulkner's the Sound and the Fury because it demonstrates the impending fate of the Compson family--silence; the end. This silence suggests that the family is doomed to be defeated by time, by change, and by their rejection of both time and change.