Submitted by napolinj@newsch... on Tue, 2014-04-08 19:40
The eldest son of Jason and Caroline Compson, Quentin is a major character in two of Faulkner's major novels, this one and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). In this novel, he is a freshman at Harvard College. It is through Quentin that the novel articulates its thematic focus on the loss of meaning in the modern world. His consciousness is haunted, for example, by his father's nihilism, by the destructiveness of time, by his own inadequacies and above all by his younger sister Caddy's lost virginity.
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Tue, 2014-04-08 17:39
Gerald Bland of Kentucky is a Harvard University classmate of Quentin who gets into a fistfight with Quentin at the end of Quentin's section. In many ways he is Quentin's polar opposite: adored by his mother, an accomplished lady's man, athletic and decisive.
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Tue, 2014-04-08 15:55
The Henry in The Sound and the Fury is the elementary school classmate who - in one of Quentin's fragmentary memories - answers the teacher's question that Quentin can't, about the discoverer of the Mississippi River.
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Tue, 2014-04-08 15:53
Miss Laura is Quentin's elementary school teacher. She disconcerts Quentin when she asks him "who discovered the Mississippi River" (88), but she may also be the teacher Quentin refers to in Benjy's section, when he tells his father about trying to protect her from a boy who "said he would put a frog in her desk" (68).
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Tue, 2014-04-08 15:50
Quentin sees this man in Virginia, from the window of the train carrying him back to Yoknapatawpha from Harvard for the holidays. He is sitting patiently on a mule without a saddle, "waiting for the train to move" (86). When Quentin calls out "Christmas gift!" to him, he replies, "Sho comin, boss. You done caught me, aint you" (87). To Quentin, he seems "like a sign put there saying You are home again" in the South (87).
Located in Charlottesville, the University of Virginia was about a century old when Gowan Stevens went there. The narrative's attitude toward the school seems satiric. Gowan boasts inordinately about how at Virginia "they had taught him how to drink like a gentleman" (57), but in the novel he does a very bad job of holding his liquor, and unchivalrously abandons a woman at the Old Frenchman place.
The University of Virginia was established in Charlottesville in 1819 as the creation of Thomas Jefferson, whose last name is at the center of all the maps of Yoknapatawpha as the name of the city that is the county seat. Faulkner himself first visited the University in the fall of 1931, as one of the participants in a conference on Southern writers; according to reports from others in attendance, he was drunk every time they saw him. Faulkner acquitted himself much more respectably during the two semesters he spent here as Writer-in-Residence in the late 1950s.
Submitted by grdenton@memphis.edu on Tue, 2014-04-08 11:17
In keeping with the pattern of inversion that is associated with Deacon, the boy who carries suitcases as part of Deacon's ritual way of greeting new Harvard students from the South is white. When Quentin remembers being met this way, he describes "a moving mountain of luggage" that was being carried by "a white boy of about fifteen" (97).
Submitted by rlcoleman@usout... on Tue, 2014-04-08 09:58
Quentin goes to two different post offices in the course of his section. This is the one in Cambridge, apparently fairly close to Harvard. He goes there early in his day, in part because he's looking for Deacon but mainly to buy stamps and mail a letter, presumably his suicide note, to his father (82). The second post office is in the town Quentin travels to later in the day. Quentin goes there looking for Anse, because a man at the livery stable "said to look at the postoffice" (130; see the location "Town Center").
Submitted by rlcoleman@usout... on Tue, 2014-04-08 09:53
Quentin Compson goes to two different post offices in the course of his section in The Sound and the Fury. This is the one in Cambridge, apparently fairly close to Harvard. He goes there early in his day, in part because he's looking for Deacon but mainly to buy stamps and mail a letter, presumably his suicide note, to his father (82). The second post office is in the town Quentin travels to later in the day. Quentin goes there looking for Anse, because a man at the livery stable "said to look at the postoffice" (130; see the location "Town Center").
