Mr. Jason Compson

Born around the time the South was defeated in the Civil War, Jason Compson III is the heir of one of Jefferson's founding families, but where his grandfather was a plantation owner and Governor of Mississippi, and his father a Confederate General, he himself is an idle lawyer who seems indifferent to the family's economic decline. In Benjy's section readers can find examples of Mr. Compson's attempts to be a good parent to his ill-assorted children, but on the whole he seems to look for refuge from time and loss in both alcoholism and a virulent form of nihilism. He goes through the motions of being a "gentleman," but refuses to believe that anything has meaning. "Father said" is one of the most frequent phrases in Quentin's section, and in those memories Quentin again and again recalls his father's fatalism. For example, Mr. Compson gives Quentin his watch (a family heirloom which was passed down by Quentin's great-grandfather to his grandfather and then to Quentin's father), and Quentin recalls his father describing the gift of the watch as follows: "I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father's." Mr. Compson's fatalism is also evident in Absalom, Absalom!, where along with his son Quentin (but not his wife or other children) he again appears as a major character.