Dilsey's Easter Conversion in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury

The main action of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury occurs during Easter Week, 1928. Because Easter is the holiest event in the Christian calendar, and because the Passion Week serves as the book's main organizing device, many readers have sensed the presence of religious themes in this often opaque work. But over the past five decades, critical interpretations have ranged from Christian spirituality to existential nothingness. While there has been no consensus on the …

…other dying and reviving deities--as well as their celebrants--Dilsey is reborn in spring. Christianity, as a religion of incarnation which stresses the transforming presence of the divine in the human, provides the specific context for Dilsey's deliverance. Her Easter conversion miraculously elevates her to an incommunicable vision of heavenly salvation. But it also leads her to forge a new secular identity independent of the Compsons and to recover an enduring family heritage of her own.