CompsonsInLIO

In this third short story narrated by Quentin Compson, he is sixteen-years-old, on one of the annual hunting trips he's been taking to Major de Spain's camp in the big woods. Readers who know Quentin as the anguished, suiciding college student in Cambridge may wonder if this adolescent is Quentin, when they see how spiritually at home he is as a hunter in the wilderness. (Faulkner will later recast this sixteen-year-old as Ike McCaslin when he rewrites "Lion" as part of the novel Go Down, Moses; Ike is another child of the plantation aristocracy, but when he enters the woods, he doesn't carry the same kind of baggage that Quentin's character brings with him from earlier fictions.) But we know it's "Quentin" when another character refers to him by name (186). The character of Quentin's father also behaves very differently in the woods: here, as opposed to The Sound and the Fury, what 'father says' is empowering, good to keep in mind; along with Sam Fathers, this father helps Quentin learn how to behave well in the wilderness.