In "Appendix Compson" Faulkner calls Jason the one "sane" male Compson (338). Readers of The Sound and the Fury, aware of his extraordinary mental cruelty to his siblings and his niece, not to mention his bigotries and venalities, are likely to use an even harsher term. But if we set his story in the context of the past that matters most in this novel, the Freudian landscape of compulsions and projections, it seems more accurate to say that Jason is as much the victim of his childhood as any of those siblings.
Speaking outside the pages of his art, Faulkner called Caddy Compson his "heart's darling," and The Sound and the Fury his attempt to draw her "picture." It's a very modern portrait, however, defined by her absence everywhere in the novel except in the minds of her three brothers, each of whom attempts to fill the absences at the center of his own life with what he tries to make her represent or (to use the term that is both there and absent in the novel's Shakespearean title) to 'signify.' On her own terms, Caddy almost too good to be believable.
Quentin Compson is a major character in two of Faulkner's greatest novels, The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!, and the narrator of four early short stories. He is also the oldest son in one of the most prominent Yoknapatawpha families but born after the South's defeat in the Civil War and at the end of the 19th century, and so has to try to grow up in a modern world that that has no place for him.
The third Compson named Jason and the father of Quentin, Caddy, Jason and Benjy was born around the time the South was defeated in the Civil War and as a result, his story suggests, grew up to become what Faulkner's "Appendix Compson" calls a "cultured dipsomaniac" (335). His story, however, is never directly told. Instead, his character is defined chiefly by his role in the life and death of his oldest son, Quentin. "Father said" is a phrase that sounds again and again from the first to the penultimate page of Quentin's section in The Sound and the Fury (76, 178).
General Jason Compson, the grandfather of Quentin, Caddy, Jason and Benjy, appears in thirteen different texts, the most of any Compson. Given Faulkner's willingness to sacrifice consistency to the needs of a particular story, it's not surprising that it's hard to pull all his appearances into one cumulative biography.
There are a few references to Quentin's great-grandfather in the early fictions about the family. In The Sound and The Fury Mr. Compson mentions him when he gives Quentin his grandfather's watch (76). In "A Justice" Sam Fathers tells Quentin the "your great-grandpappy" bought him and his mother as slaves (344).
Requiem for a Nun identifies the first member of the family in Yoknapatawpha as "a man named Compson" (11) - but which Compson? Faulkner's fictions answer that question three different ways; there is no way to reconcile them, but this Compson is probably the one with the best claim. In the prose introduction to Act I of Requiem, which actually takes place in the earliest days of the frontier settlement that will become Jefferson, the "Compson" who takes charge of a tense situation is not given any first name.
According to the early genealogy that Faulkner's 1946 "Appendix" creates for the Compson family, Charles Stuart Compson is the first member to be born in the new world. Named after Charles Stuart the Young Pretender, for whom his father fought in Scotland, Charles Stuart Compson served under the British commander Banastre Tarleton in the American Revolutionary War; Charles Stuart was thus part of the military serving the monarchy his father had formerly opposed.
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.
When Mr. Compson gives his son Quentin the watch that belonged to Quentin's grandfather, he mentions that grandfather's "father" (76). In the "Appendix" to the novel that Faulkner wrote 17 years later, he gives this great-grandfather a name - Quentin MacLachan Compson II - and explicitly identifies him as the "governor" whom Quentin refers to in the novel when he thinks "one of our forefathers was a governor" (101). In the novel, however, this connection is not made, and there is no other reference to this great-grandfather.
