Cambridge Inset: River and Drawbridge in The Sound and the Fury (Location)

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. Because of the "schooner" he watches passing through the open bridge, it seems likely that all this is taking place closer to Boston Harbor than Harvard (89); at any rate that is where we have placed it on the map.