I think that Faulker has chosen to tell his story in the most convoluted way possible. He has a plethora of twists and obstacles that the reader must navigate his way through. We start the story being immediately introduced to an extremely unreliable narrator. Benjy’s life and clearly present disability is complicated, but as a narrator, he brings this baggage into his story. We are getting the “Benjy side” of the story, not the reality of the situation.
There are many idiosyncrasies intertwined into Benjy’s character. These idiosyncrasies that make up Benjy, are important to understand. If you are able to understand the way Benjy lives his life and the way Benjy’s extremely different and independent mind thinks, the understanding of time and place becomes much simpler. Benjy has an extremely strange relationship with time— he seems to have a strange relationship with all things set and stone and abstract. Benjy does not rely on time the way many narrators in books do, but instead, he seems to be very instinctual. Without time, the reader is left to put situations and places into the correct chronological order. The reader has to sift through this pandemonium— the pandemonium that is also consuming Benjy’s psychological mind. Instead of time, Benjy tends to rely on human traits such as his senses. Benjy is very keen and aware of sounds, smells, and most importantly human experience.
Benjy experiences human actions and progressions through his sister, Caddy. He is tied to her every move. He can sense her mood. He can sense when something is wrong or when something is different. But, he can most importantly sense when change has occurred. It seems that Benjy’s sense of time is circled around and based upon the pivotal moments in Caddy’s life. Benjy mentions particular incidents in which he is incapable to accept Caddy’s actions. Some of these incidents include: Caddy’s first kiss and Caddy losing her virginity. This shows me that Benjy is forever a child. He does not want to experience change. He does not want to change and he does not want the people and the places around him to change. This is an additional aspect that creates Benjy as an unreliable narrator. Benjy tends to look at the people around him and their actions. Benjy does not give the reader a glance solely into his perspective of a situation. Benjy’s perspective is often neither the realistic nor the rational perspective. (472)
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Abigail, for different reasons, and in very different ways, neither Benjy nor Quentin can accept the need for change. Both cling to images of the past--in Benjy's case the loving innocence of his sister Caddy, in Quentin's case the honor of the family, symbolized somehow by Caddy's purity and virginity. And when change does occur, it is catastrophic, causing Benjy to moan inconsolably for the rest of his life, and causing Quentin to end his life. Yes, they have very different levels of understanding, but the root of the problem in both cases is fundamentally the same.
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