Submitted by grdenton@memphis.edu on Thu, 2014-04-03 11:21
The bridge over the Charles River that Quentin jumps from to commit suicide is an important location in The Sound and the Fury, but there has long been confusion about its location. Decades ago an anonymous aficionado of Faulkner actually put up a small memorial plaque for Quentin on the Anderson Memorial Bridge in Cambridge, but that is much too close to Harvard (and was not built until five years after Quentin's death).
Submitted by grdenton@memphis.edu on Thu, 2014-04-03 11:01
Not far from Parker's and the jewelry store in Boston is the hardware store where Quentin goes to buy something heavy enough to make sure that he will drown when he jumps into the river. Because the ten-pound "tailor's goose" is too big, he buys "two six-pound little ones" instead (85). A tailor's goose is a type of flat iron; the name derives from the curve of its handle.
Submitted by napolinj@newsch... on Wed, 2014-04-02 14:52
In The Sound and the Fury Jason Compson keeps the car he's so proud of in what he thinks of as "the garage" (187). The building almost certainly was built as the antebellum mansion's carriage house, and presumably it's also where the family keeps the "surrey" in which Mrs. Compson makes her weekly pilgrimages to the cemetery. After this transformation from carriage house to car garage, the structure is transformed again in The Mansion: in a still more damning example, from Faulkner's perspective, of history and change as loss, the building becomes the home of a Snopes.
Submitted by napolinj@newsch... on Wed, 2014-04-02 14:48
The Pattersons live next door to the Compsons. Maury Bascomb had an affair with Mrs. Patterson when the Compson children were young. At least once Caddy takes her a letter from "Uncle Maury," and sometime later Benjy tries to deliver another. On that occasion we hear her call Benjy "you idiot" as she tries to grab the letter before her husband can reach him (13).
Submitted by napolinj@newsch... on Wed, 2014-04-02 14:38
Candace Compson is the second child and only daughter of Jason and Caroline Compson. Faulkner often referred to her character as his "heart's darling." Attractive, caring, active, in some respects braver and even more conventionally masculine than any of her brothers, she is nonetheless trapped inside a complex set of circumstances: her dysfunctional and very needy family, Southern codes of female respectability, and her own biology.
Submitted by napolinj@newsch... on Tue, 2014-04-01 20:00
Roskus is husband to Dilsey and father to Versh, T.P., and Frony. He drives for the Compsons while also caring for the farm animals, although over the years his rheumatism makes that increasingly hard. He is slightly less loyal than his wife to the white family he works for, complaining that there "aint no luck on this place" (29). Dilsey reproaches him for giving their son Versh "them Memphis notions" - that is, presumably, encouraging Versh to leave Yoknapatawpha (31).
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Tue, 2014-04-01 17:55
French Lick, where Mrs. Compson takes Caddy and they meet Herbert Head, is a town in southern Indiana. Since before the Civil War it has been well-known as a resort community with hotels and spas built up around its sulfur springs.
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Tue, 2014-04-01 17:25
Deacon is a fixture among the students at Harvard in 1910, especially the ones who come from the south. Black and, according to Quentin, a "natural psychologist" (97), he meets these southerners when they first arrive in Cambridge, "in a sort of Uncle Tom's cabin outfit, patches and all" (97) and proceeds to manipulate their prejudices to his own benefit. He tells Quentin that "you and me's the same folks, come long and short," and that Southerners are "fine folks. But you can't live with them" (99). He seems very much at home in the urban world of Boston.
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Tue, 2014-04-01 15:58
After leaving Parker's, Quentin notes that "two bootblacks caught me, one on either side, shrill and raucous, like blackbirds. I gave the cigar to one of them, and the other one a nickel" (83). Though the text does not make their race explicit, the "blackbird" image suggests that these two individuals are African American.
