Submitted by grdenton@memphis.edu on Thu, 2014-04-10 10:34
Eighty miles long, the Charles River flows between Boston and Cambridge before emptying into Boston Harbor. Most of Quentin's wanderings during the day stay close to it. It is still, as in the novel, where the Harvard crew teams row. However, like most of the Massachusetts settings in Quentin's section, the drawbridge where Quentin gets off the trolley, looks at the Charles River "healing out to the sea" (90), and then watches Gerald Bland take a shell from a boathouse and start rowing is apparently Faulkner's invention.
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Wed, 2014-04-09 08:39
A new arrival in Jefferson in the summer of 1909, Dalton Ames is the first man Caddy Compson has sex with, and may be the father of Caddy's daughter. Caddy tells Quentin that Ames has "been in the army had killed men" (148) and "crossed all the oceans all around the world" (150). Quentin discovers for himself how good Ames is with a pistol when he tries ordering him to leave town. For more than one reason Quentin feels that Ames is not a proper suitor for Caddy, including the issue of class; his name, Quentin thinks, "just missed gentility" (92).
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Wed, 2014-04-09 08:33
Mrs. Bland is the mother of Quentin's Harvard classmate Gerald; she has moved from Kentucky to Cambridge to be close to her son. She lays claim to an aristocratic heritage, and in person is both formal and insistent. Shreve calls her "fate in eight yards of apricot silk" (106).
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Wed, 2014-04-09 08:21
The Pattersons' house is adjacent to the Compsons'. Quentin remembers that when Jason was younger, he and "the Patterson boy . . . made kites on the back porch and sold them for a nickel a piece" (94). Jason parted ways with him, apparently when the boy complained about not getting his share of the profits.
Submitted by rlcoleman@usout... on Tue, 2014-04-08 23:21
Colonel Sartoris looms large over Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha fiction, Flags in the Dust - originally published in 1929 as Sartoris. In that novel he was killed fifteen or more years before the Compson children were born.
Submitted by rlcoleman@usout... on Tue, 2014-04-08 23:07
His first name is not given in this novel, but he appears in a dozen more Yoknapatawpha fictions (more than any other Compson), and several of them, including the "Appendix" to The Sound and the Fury that Faulkner published in 1946, identify the full name of the paternal grandfather of the Compson children as "Jason Lycurgus Compson." He is the second Compson with that name; there are two more who appear in the novel: his son Mr. Compson, and Mr. and Mrs. Compson's third child, who is Jason IV.
Submitted by rlcoleman@usout... on Tue, 2014-04-08 22:54
After the Patterson boy stops selling kites with him, Jason finds a new partner, presumably another child about his own age (and presumably more lackadaisical than the Patterson boy about who ends up with the money they make).
Submitted by grdenton@memphis.edu on Tue, 2014-04-08 20:44
The three boys whom Quentin talks with at the bridge argue about whether to go to "the Eddy" and fish, or to "the mill" and swim (121). When he next sees them, they are swimming (136). They call the mill "Bigelow's"; if it is like the other mills built along the river to take advantage of water power, there is a dam across the river behind which the water would likely be quiet and deep.
Submitted by napolinj@newsch... on Tue, 2014-04-08 19:40
The eldest son of Jason and Caroline Compson, Quentin is a major character in two of Faulkner's major novels, this one and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). In this novel, he is a freshman at Harvard College. It is through Quentin that the novel articulates its thematic focus on the loss of meaning in the modern world. His consciousness is haunted, for example, by his father's nihilism, by the destructiveness of time, by his own inadequacies and above all by his younger sister Caddy's lost virginity.
