CompsonsInRQ

Two of the four Jason Compsons in the fictions appear in this novel, as father and son. The father appears in "Act I" without a first name, as "a man named Compson" who, while not among the very first white men to arrive in the settlement that becomes Jefferson, is a leader in its early history. He acquires the large piece of property that becomes the Compson plantation from the Indians, establishing his place in Yoknapatawpha's landed gentry before the Sartorises, but interestingly in "Act III," where he is referred to as Jason Compson, he also becomes a partner in the settlement's store - a more commercial source of wealth than the Compsons have been associated with in the past, until they fall on harder times in the 20th century and the last Jason winds up clerking in the hardware store in The Sound and the Fury. The son served as a Confederate officer during the Civil War - and is known in the narrative only by his military title, General Compson - but in the novel's brief account of him, he is associated not with military command or the plantation aristocracy, but also with business, his short-lived investment in Sartoris' railroad. Faulkner, that is to say, is shifting the Compson family past from a quasi-aristocratic to a capitalistic context. (In other texts, it should be noted, the second Jason Compson is the grandson rather than the son of the first.)