Cambridge Inset: Bridge (Location Key)

The bridge over the Charles River that Quentin jumps from to commit suicide is an important location in The Sound and the Fury, but there has long been confusion about its location. Decades ago an anonymous aficionado of Faulkner actually put up a small memorial plaque for Quentin on the Anderson Memorial Bridge in Cambridge, but that is much too close to Harvard (and was not built until five years after Quentin's death). The bridge Quentin visits in the morning, to hide the weights he will put in his pockets when he returns that night to end his life, is an "interurban" train ride away from Harvard and Boston (104), in an area that seems rural enough, with trees and a swimming hole, to suggest the less developed world he left behind in Mississippi. The place we've located it, however, upriver from Harvard, is admittedly a guess.