Page numbers refer to the Vintage International "corrected text" paperback edition of The Sound and the Fury, published by Random House. Scene numbers are supplied for convenient cross-referencing.
P. 3, Scene 1 (1928) Through the fence . . .
As indicated by the heading, this section is set in the present time, April 7, 1928, which is the Saturday before Easter Sunday. (Faulkner was very careful to make the date coincide with the actual date of Easter in that particular year.) Throughout this section, the dating is easy since each scene is identified by the presence of Luster as Benjy's attendant and by Luster's searching for a lost quarter as they wander about the Compson premises.
In the appendix to Malcolm Cowley's The Portable Faulkner and also in the Norton critical edition of the novel, Faulkner wrote that Luster was fourteen years old and that Luster was capable of handling an idiot who was twice his age. Since Benjy is thirty-three on this day, Luster would have had to be sixteen or seventeen. Furthermore, internal evidence in the section indicates that Luster would have to be more than fourteen because in another scene (Scene 7), which occurs in April 1913, Luster is already born and is playing with baby Quentin, Caddy's daughter. We must therefore assume that Faulkner was in error in assigning Luster's age as fourteen. After all, he wrote the appendix approximately sixteen years later without rereading the novel (see Malcolm Cowley, The Faulkner-Cowley File), and the appendix should be viewed, at least partly, as a separate artistic creation because there are several other troublesome inconsistencies between it and the text.
