Submitted by napolinj@newsch... on Thu, 2014-03-27 14:34
For over a quarter of a century, apparently, the "garden fence" between the Compson yard and the farm area behind the house has had a hole in it - a hole with a nail sticking out (4). When Luster takes Benjy through this hole in 1928 to look for the lost quarter in The Sound and the Fury, Benjy remembers getting snagged in the same place and presumably on the same nail twenty-five years earlier, while going off the place with Caddy to deliver a message from Uncle Maury to Mrs. Patterson.
Submitted by grdenton@memphis.edu on Tue, 2014-03-25 20:20
Louis Hatcher is an elderly black man who goes possum hunting with Quentin and Versh on a windless October night. Thinking of him, Quentin notes that he "never even used his [hunting] horn carrying it" (114). He does use the lantern he carries, but the last time he cleaned it, he tells Quentin, was during the 1889 flood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania; he and his wife Martha were afraid the flood waters would reach Yoknapatawpha. It is possible but unlikely that he is the "Louis" who teaches Caddy how to drive a car (93).
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Tue, 2014-03-25 20:04
Referred to simply as "the girl" (83), this employee at Parker's Restaurant recommends the fifty-cent cigar to Quentin as the best - he buys one, lights it, and then quickly gives it away.
Submitted by grdenton@memphis.edu on Tue, 2014-03-25 20:03
This Jason is the third child born to Jason and Caroline Compson. He is the last Compson male in Jefferson capable of having children, and he is in some kind of sexual relationship with a woman in Memphis named Lorraine, but he remains childless. He sees himself as an innocent victim of other people, and casts himself in the role of the guardian of his family's honor and his mother's good name from various antagonistic forces, especially his sister and niece. The tone of his narrative is bitter, restless, angry and even funny, though there is a good deal of sadism in his sense of humor.
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Tue, 2014-03-25 19:57
The jeweler to whom Quentin shows his broken watch appears only briefly, but is described in a few vivid details. He is "going bald," his hair is "parted in the center," and "the part runs up into the bald spot, like a drained marsh in December" (83, 85). The jeweler's loupe he wears while working "left a red circle around his eye" (84). He seems familiar with the customs of Harvard students; Quentin's behavior makes him think he has been drinking, perhaps to celebrate the crew meet in New London.
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Tue, 2014-03-25 19:52
Not far from Parker's restaurant and the jewelry store that Quentin Compson visits in The Sound and the Fury is the Boston hardware store where he goes to buy something heavy enough to make sure he drowns when he jumps into the Charles 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 thagood@fau.edu on Tue, 2014-03-25 19:44
Spoade is a senior at Harvard University from South Carolina. He jokingly calls Shreve Quentin's "husband" (78). According to Quentin, Spoade has "five names, including that of a present English ducal house" (91-92), but never thinks of him except as "Spoade." He lives up to the image of a southern aristocrat in a number of ways besides his name, including the fact that he goes to chapel every day in dishabille. Quentin can tell it's nearly noon when he sees that Spoade has put his shirt on (95).
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Tue, 2014-03-25 19:36
In The Sound and the Fury Quentin Compson takes a "car" (a trolley) and crosses "over to town" (i.e. over the Charles River from Cambridge to Boston) to have "a good breakfast" at a place called Parker's (83). Presumably Faulkner is thinking of the Parker House, a well-known Boston hotel and restaurant.
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Tue, 2014-03-25 19:32
Quentin Compson takes his broken watch into a Boston jeweler's in The Sound and the Fury, but he seems more interested in the "dozen watches" in the store window, each set to a different time and "contradicting one another" (85). Looking at one of them, with its "hands extended slightly off the horizontal," he chooses the time that evening when he will commit suicide - about 9:15.
