Mr. Compson

The Compson family is one of the most important in the Yoknapatawpha fictions, and the place of its various members on the family tree is usually very well established. But it is not easy to identify the man to whom Mrs. Compson refers as her husband in this chapter. Bayard notes that this man was "locked up for crazy a long time ago," and relates without comment how he used to amuse himself on the Compson plantation by shooting sweet potatoes off the heads of slave children with a rifle (193). In The Sound and the Fury (1929), the "Appendix" to that novel (1946) and a few other texts, readers learn, vaguely, about a state governor among the family's ancestors; the vagueness of his biography makes it possible that this is antebellum planter who ended his life in an institution. At any rate, we have made that assumption.