Grandfather

The name of the man Quentin's narrative calls "Grandfather" is never given in this story, but he appears in eleven other Yoknapatawpha texts, and several of them, including the "Appendix" to The Sound and the Fury that Faulkner published in 1946, identify the full name of the paternal grandfather of the Compson children as "Jason Lycurgus Compson II." While he is deceased at the time Quentin Compson is narrating "A Justice," he would take his grandchildren to the Compson family farm "every Saturday afternoon" (343). Grandfather is described by Quentin as an authoritative and a somewhat grand figure, "because we all believed that he did fine things, that his waking life passed from one fine (if faintly grandiose) picture to another" (360). On the other hand, his identity as a major landowner and employer of "the Negroes" who live in "the quarters" on his farm (343) seems complicated by the 'injustice' described in the story's account of slavery and race.