Cambridge Inset: Town Center (Location Key)

To get to the bridge in The Sound and the Fury where he will commit suicide later, Quentin takes an "interurban" train to an unidentified town or small city some miles from Cambridge (105). The train follows a route parallel to the Charles River; the text does not say in which direction, east or west, but because the landscape he finds when he decides to get off the train is more rural - "the road went into the trees," for example (112) - it seems most likely that imaginatively, Faulkner located this second town to the west of Harvard. The specific sites included in this Location are: the street with "white houses" and "picket fences" where the boy in a "white shirt" climbs up a tree (123); the bakery where Quentin purchases two buns, and encounters the little immigrant girl whom he calls "sister" (125); the drugstore nearby where he buys ice cream for her; the several places he visits briefly while looking for her home, i.e. an unspecified "store" (129), the livery stable (130), the "postoffice" (130) and the train station (131); and finally the shabby magistrate's office in the "one storey building of brick trimmed with white" to which he is taken by the marshal (142).