Compson Inset: Pear Tree in The Sound and the Fury (Location)

This is the tree that Benjy refers to as "the flower tree" (3). Faulkner himself referred to it often as the scene of the image with which the novel took hold of his imagination: as he told an audience at the University of Virginia, for example, The Sound and the Fury "began with the - the picture of the - the little girl's muddy drawers, climbing that tree to look in the parlor window with her brothers that didn't have the courage to climb the tree waiting to see what she saw." Benjy remembers watching Caddy climb up "that tree" in 1898 and ends his day in 1927 watching Caddy's daughter climb down it for the last time (39, 74). In the novel's fourth section the narrator describes it as a "pear tree" growing "close against the house"; in April it is "in bloom," and the breeze carries "the forlorn scent of the blossoms" through the open window of Miss Quentin's room and into the house (282).