Be careful. This shit rocks hard.
This is a hard one to break up, especially since I want to spend more time on the beginning, more stream-of-consciousness bits than the easier ending half. We are going to start slow with fewer than 20 pages of Benjy’s section on 2/2, and then set you loose on the rest of his section. We’ll speed up a little starting with Jason and Faulkner’s/Dilsey’s sections; there’s a lot to discuss there, but the writing is more straightforward. Because February is awkwardly short, you have extra time to finish Dilsey’s section, and we’ll discuss it all at once.
I will also make a post explaining Benjy a little bit, so those who don’t want to puzzle out the text for themselves can read it with less confusion. Look for that before 2/1.
- 2/2 - Beginning to “What is the matter with you, Luster said,” about page 18
- 2/6 “What is the matter with you, Luster said,” to the end of April 7th, 1928
- 2/9 - June 2, 1910 to “At last I couldn’t see the smoke stack,” around page 113 a little after a dialog section in italics
- 2/13 - “At last I couldn’t see the smoke stack” to “If that hamper is in the way, Mr MacKenzie,” just before lots of italics, around page 147
- 2/16 - “If that hamper is in the way, Mr MacKenzie,” to the end of June 2, 1910
- 2/20 - April 6, 1928 to the letter, “My dear young nephew,” around halfway through the section or about page 223
- 2/23 - The letter through the end of April 6, 1928
- 2/28 - April 8, 1928
I am so excited to discuss this book with you. I'll see you soon!
Well... how's that for an opening line? Lol. Jason is an asshole and a half, well-written but exhausting to read because he's just hateful all the time. I hope you found him easier going than Benjy and Quentin!
A lot of questions are answered here. After Caddy's "fall", the Compson family quickly dominos. She's abandoned by her husband when she has her child, whom she gives to her mother and Jason to raise. (I'm not clear whether Quentin is already dead when she names her daughter after him.) The job offer Jason had, to work with her fiancé at his bank, dries up, and he has to work as a store clerk. Quentin the Elder drowns himself. Jason Sr. dies not long after this (I think) and the family dwindles to Caroline, Jason, Benjy and Quentin the Younger.
Jason is really vicious. He pulls some really abusive crap, like:
- Taking Caddy's money, meant to reimburse him for the risk he's taking in letting her meet baby Quentin, and then driving past her at a gallop while holding the baby up to the window
- Stealing most of the money Caddy sends for teen Quentin to have
- Pocketing the checks Caddy sends as child support, then forging fake checks for Caroline to burn
- Just being absolutely horrible to everyone, Jesus, this guy is the worst
How do you think he got that way? Why does he hate Caddy so much, and why does he meet her in person every few months?
Do you think his mother's favoritism had any part in it? Notice her crying on him when he's a teenager and baby Quentin is brought to the house. She has a husband! Caddy and Quentin don't seem to be the only ones committing figurative incest, do they?
Why do you think Jason's story picks up where it does? We've seen nearly nothing of the family until his late teenage years, after Caddy's fall and Quentin's death.
How is Caddy portrayed in his section? It's interesting how this part is told from Jason's point of view, and he obviously has a low opinion of her, but she comes off as extremely sympathetic anyway (at least to me).
What's going on with Quentin the younger? Why does she need the $50? We've met her as a teenager before, in Benjy's section.
One last thing I wanted to point out is: when she's grabbed by Jason at breakfast, Quentin says she wants her mother (and I assume she means Caddy, who she knows sends her checks; she definitely doesn't run to Caroline). By Jason's account, she's never met her. What's going on there?
How do the other characters react to Jason? He's not nice to a single pers
... keep reading on reddit ➡
In the second half of Jason’s section, he continues to be the absolute worst. He’s a terrible employee—he arrives late, lies about why he’s late back, leaves the store after Quentin, returns after far longer than Earl thought he’d be gone, is a complete jerk to the man responsible for paying him, and then vanishes again.
He also took a thousand dollars from his mother and instead of investing it in Earl’s business, a lie he maintains to her, he bought a car. Nice going, Jason. When he gets a letter from Maury about a business opportunity—it looks like Maury has the same business sense as Jason—he tells his mother she’ll be throwing her money away if she gives it to Maury, but the same thing happens when she helps Jason.
They’re both perpetual victims, but in different ways: Caroline seems to say things like “You’ll all be better off when I’m gone," with the aim of causing guilt and/or getting reassurance, which sort of works with Dilsey but not with Jason. (Yet she keeps trying!) Jason is just biting and hateful and he’s the only person who can do anything right, yet everyone keeps taking advantage. If not for them, he’d have Earl retired, he’d have Quentin behaving, he’d have the family solvent. It’s okay for him to slack off because he has important business to take care of, but if Job does it, or if Quentin cuts school or the servants don’t pull their weight, or the telegraph people can’t find him because he’s running all over town after his niece, it’s inexcusable.
At one point, Quentin and her beau play a trick on him; they park the beau’s truck half hidden, and when Jason gets out and trudges through the weeds after them, they double back and let the air out of his tires. He thinks they’re completely inept because he would have slashed them. He seems to operate under the assumption that everyone is as terrible as he is, always out to steal money, wasting time, running on a steady diet of spite.
Also, whoa, check out this part:
> “…Let alone a woman that cant name the father of her own child.” > > “Jason,” she says. > > “All right,” I says. “I didn’t mean that. Of course not.” > > “If I believed that were possible, after all my suffering.” > > “Of course it’s not,” I says. “I didn’t mean it.” > > “I hope that at least is spared me,” she says. > > “Sure it is,” I says. “She’s too much like both of them to doubt that.”
Uh, do Jason and his mom think that Quentin (Mr.) is Miss Quentin’s father? Thought
... keep reading on reddit ➡Congratulations, you got through Benjy’s section! Let’s start with Quentin.
Quentin is Benjy’s opposite. He’s an unreliable narrator, too, but while Benjy reports exactly what happened, Quentin reports things that may or may not have happened, and seems to hide a lot even from himself. Note how he interrupts his own memories sometimes.
Think of Quentin’s thought patterns as not necessarily truthful, but things he might be imagining or repeating to himself. “Father I have committed incest” is directly contradicted by him saying he’s a virgin a little bit later (why couldn’t Caddy be the virgin, etc etc), for example. Some of what he thinks is like an imaginary shower conversation, or intrusive thoughts. It can be helpful to look to others’ reactions to know what’s real and what isn’t.
The first thing I want to talk about is Quentin’s relationship to time. Like Benjy, certain things send him into memories. What are those things? And how is his concept of time different from Benjy’s? He seems obsessed with it.
In fact, he seems obsessed with a lot of things, chief among them Caddy. Note how he relates to every woman as a sister, and gets outraged when Shreve talks about “little dirty sluts”. Quentin asks Shreve, “Did you ever have a sister?” Or, you can only talk that way about women because you haven’t had the experience of feeling protective over one.
And maybe there’s a little bit of discomfort there. Certainly Caddy isn’t a sparkling example of chastity! Remember close to the end of Benjy’s section when he’s clutching at her dress and crying and he doesn’t say why? I think Caddy has lost her virginity, which is suuuuuper important to at least two of the men in her family so far. What must Quentin be thinking when Shreve mentions “dirty little sluts”, knowing someone could be thinking of Caddy that way?
There is so much to discuss here, and I’ve been prattling on for ages. Here’s some questions:
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Quentin has a southern code of honor and a southern philosophy that drives him. It informs his relationship with both blacks and whites at Harvard, and it’ll come up again later, when he meets some Italian immigrants. How is he keeping to that code? Do you think it has anything to do with Caddy?
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What’s with the incest? Does he actually want to sex up his sister or does he just think that might have been better than losing her virginity to (I suspect) this Dalton Ames guy?
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Does Caddy seem to appreciate his protectiveness?
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This is a real questio
So I just read “The Sound and The Fury” by William Faulkner and I noticed a ton of similarities to ‘Time’s Arrow’ and other episodes featuring the Horseman family.
A once illustrious, happy family falls into disrepair when the elder son dies and the daughter loses her innocence and the father is traditional and cruel so the daughter elopes with a vagabond.
Plus the whole narrative weaving happens in the book where many scenes and elements of the story occur at once, just as in ‘Time’s Arrow’.
“I walked upon my shadow, trampling it into the dappled shade of trees again. The road curved, mounting away from the water. It crossed the hill, then descending winding, carrying the eye, the mind on ahead beneath a still green tunnel, and the square cupola above the trees and the round eye of the clock but far enough. I sat down on the roadside. The grass was ankle deep, myriad. The shadows on the road were as still as if they had been put there with a stencil, with slanting pencils of sunlight. But it was only a train, and after a while it died away beyond the trees, the long sound, and then I could hear my watch and the train dying away, as though it were running through another month or another summer somewhere, rushing away under the poised gull and all things rushing” (101).
It's just a fan theory of mine, but I'm currently reading The Sound and The Fury and I can't help see parallels between the characters. In Lev Grossman's own article in Time Magazine, All-TIME 100 Novels ,he described Quentin Compson as "a depressed, neurotic Harvard student", sound like anyone?
Edit: Theory confirmed, found an article by Grossman: "p. 3: “Quentin.” The name is borrowed from another overly bright, way too self-conscious young man: Quentin Compson from The Sound and the Fury."
It's an interesting read anyways, he hides many allusions throughout the book:
https://www.tor.com/2011/08/11/a-brief-guide-to-the-hidden-allusions-in-the-magicians/
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