Word: dilsey
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...point. In many ways, the common people of this book are like those of The Sound and the Fury. There is a real feeling of perpetuity in their lives and in the lives of the people around them. Their commonness and their universality make them real to us; like Dilsey, the Compton's maid, "they endured," and they will endure...
...Kill a Mockingbird) has homespun out of it. The farmer undergoes every conceivable trial and hardship. When the woman dies soon after giving birth, the farmer devotedly raises the child (Johnny Mask) as his own, only to see the law return him eventually to his natural father. But like Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury, the farmer endures. Foote's script and Anthony's leaden direction transform this small saga of indomitability into a mere valentine to pluckiness...
Only the old Negro servant of the family, Dilsey Gibson, can be seen as whole and fully human. Some have found Dilsey heroically simple to the point of sentimental caricature of the "black mammy." Faulkner clearly intended her as a celebration of the quality of Negro endurance that survives with dignity in the Deep South. She is also the book's moral norm, against which the reader measures the decline of the Compsons into drunkenness, hypochondria, idiocy, promiscuity and suicide. Through the three decades spanned by the novel, Dilsey Gibson, with her strength, patience and honesty, is the only...
...type of Southerner who constantly vents his frustration with lines such as "What this country needs is white labor. Let these damn trifling niggers starve for a couple of years, then they'd see what a soft thing they have." Negro Novelist Ralph Ellison says that the enduring Dilsey Gibson reminds him of the real-life Rosa Parks, who touched off the Birmingham, Ala., bus boycott one day in 1955 when she refused to stand up for a white passenger because her feet hurt. Lucas Beauchamp catches to perfection the abrasive, unbending independence of a man like James Meredith...
...past never existed not ever could again. In his inability to face the world in its frightening reality, Quentin loses the will to live. His death by drowning in the Charles River on June 2, 1910 perhaps reflects Faulkner's own deepest feelings about man and his problems. Even Dilsey, perhaps, is not more a beloved character than Quentin. But it is obliquely with Dilsey and with the idiot Benjy that The Sound and the Fury closes, and the much affirmed will to survive asserts itself once more as the characters commence their progress into eternity with...