Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Thu, 2014-03-20 15:56
Kentucky is mentioned often in Quentin's section, as the place where Gerald Bland and his mother are from. Jason refers to the Kentucky city of Louisville during a rant against the attitude of Yankees about African Americans: "Get [black people] ahead, what I say. Get them so far ahead you cant find one south of Louisville with a blood hound" (231). Louisville is on the Ohio River, which like the Mason-Dixon line was a boundary between the "free" North and the "slave" South.
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Thu, 2014-03-20 15:54
The train bearing Quentin back from Harvard to Mississippi for Christmas stops somewhere in Virginia, and Quentin, missing Roskus, Dilsey, and other African Americans from home, sees a black man on a mule and calls out "Christmas gift!" to him (87).
Submitted by chlester0@gmail.com on Thu, 2014-03-20 15:51
Joe Christmas' story is the most developed of the novel's various narrative lines, though at its center is the unresolvable question of his racial identity. The novel refers to his skin more than once as "parchmentcolored" (120), but race in the world of the novel is defined by the (hypothetical) color of one's "blood," as black or white. Joe is not definitively one or the other. He is the illegitimate son of Milly Hines and a circus worker of uncertain lineage, left at Christmas time anonymously at an orphanage in Memphis by his grandfather, Doc Hines.
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Thu, 2014-03-20 15:50
Various places in Virginia are mentioned in a score of fictions. Eight are gathered into the "Virginia in Civil War" entry in this index, and three into the "Unversity of Virginia" entry. Nine more are gathered here, beginning with Absalom, Absalom! - where Thomas Sutpen's family travels west to east across the whole state over perhaps several years before he reaches adolesence.
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Thu, 2014-03-20 15:49
After breakfast, Quentin takes his broken watch into a Boston jeweler's, 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.
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Thu, 2014-03-20 15:46
Quentin takes a "car" (a trolley) and crosses "over to town" (i.e. over the Charles River 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 Thu, 2014-03-20 15:44
In Quentin's section of The Sound and the Fury Mrs. Bland takes her son Gerald, two young women, Spoade, Shreve and finally (after he is released by the magistrate) Quentin somewhere for an outdoor "party" (168). The location is not specified, and the fact that Quentin's mind is 'in' Mississippi and his past for almost the entire scene does not make it any easier to tell where they are in Massachusetts. The spot, however, doesn't seem far from the Italian neighborhood in the suburbs of Boston where Quentin joined them.
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Thu, 2014-03-20 14:10
St. Louis, Missouri, is over 350 miles from Jefferson. It is mentioned twice in the novel. First, Quentin mentions it when recalling that "Father brought back a watch-charm from the Saint Louis Fair to Jason" (80). The city is also the home of the Reverend Shegog, the minister who preaches at Dilsey's church on Easter Sunday.
Submitted by thagood@fau.edu on Thu, 2014-03-20 13:58
The oldest university in the United States and the institution in which Quentin Compson matriculates because, as his father tells him, "for you to go to Harvard has been your mothers dream since you were born" (178). The section "June 2, 1910" begins there, when Quentin wakes up there in the dorm room he shares with Shreve, and ends there as well, when Quentin leaves the room for the last time.
