General Jason Lycurgus Compson

General Compson is said to have had "three avatars": "the one as son of a brilliant and gallant statesman, the second as a battleleader of brave and gallant men, the third as a sort of privileged pseudo-Daniel Boone-Robinson Crusoe, who had not returned to juvenility because actually he had never left it" (330). General Compson begins the tradition of Compson men who "fail at everything [they touch] save longevity or suicide" (330). He suffers two majors losses in the Civil War, at Shiloh and Resaca. He "put the first mortgage on the still intact square mile" and continues to mortgage and sell pieces of the Compson domain until "he died quietly on an army cot in the hunting and fishing camp in the Tallahatchie River bottom where he passed most of the end of his days" (329). His death occurs in 1900.