Quentin Compson I

Character Key Number: 
44
Display Name: 
Quentin Compson I
Sort Name: 
Compson, Quentin MacLachan I
Ever Present in Yoknapatawpha?: 
No
Biography: 

When Faulkner creates four earlier generations of Compsons in the "Appendix" he wrote in 1945, Quentin MacLachan Compson - the great-great-great grandfather of the Quentin Compson who appears in The Sound and the Fury - is the first one who is given a first name. This Quentin I is the "son of a Glasgow printer, orphaned and raised by his mother's people" (326) in the Perth Highlands. He is driven from Culloden Moor, presumably as a result of the rebel Jacobites' last battle against the Hanovarian government of Britain, which occurred at that site in 1746, and flees across the Atlantic to Carolina. In 1779, at age eighty, he flees from the American Revolutionary War to Kentucky with his grandson. His entry in the "Appendix" is marked by repeated references to his tartan, which accompanies him through every stage of his migration.