General Compson's|Mr. Compson's Office (Location Key)

Quite a few lawyers and judges have law offices on Courthouse Square. In Absalom, Absalom! General Compson appears as both a cotton planter and a Confederate officer, but neither occupation explains why he needs the office in Jefferson where both Thomas and Judith Sutpen visit him on different occasions. However, the other occupation that most of the men in the General's caste practice is lawyer, so that seems the likely explanation here; it would explain why the office is near the courthouse (163), and why Judith seeks his help in the courtroom. In the earlier text The Sound and the Fury the General's son, Jason Compson, is a lawyer, although his avocation in that novel is drinking at home, and his office is not mentioned. And in the "Appendix" that Faulkner wrote for The Sound and the Fury a decade after Absalom! was published, Jason keeps but no longer uses "an office upstairs above the Square" in Jefferson; it's an old office, where the "dusty filing-cases . . . entomb" many of "the oldest names in the county" (330), so it seems likely Faulkner imagines it as the same one his father had.