The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

Although Quentin Compson III appears most prominently in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!, his entry in the "Appendix" still holds surprises for those already familiar with his character. Faulkner articulates here more fully that Quentin loves "not his sister's body but some concept of Compson honor" that is tied to her virginity (331). In claiming that he and she had committed incest, Quentin hopes to get himself and his sister cast "into hell, where he could guard her forever and keep her forevermore intact amid the eternal fire" (331).

The wife of Jason Compson III, identified in The Sound and the Fury as Caroline Compson nee Bascomb, is referred to only briefly in the "Appendix." She is long-widowed, is cared for by her son Jason IV after her husband's death, and dies in 1933.

Jason Compson III inherits a weighty family tradition, as the descendant of an explorer, a governor, and a general. He himself, however, is concisely characterized as a "cultured dipsomaniac who sold the last of his patrimony not to buy drink but to give one of his descendants at least the best chance in life he could think of" (335). He was "bred for a lawyer," but showed little signs of application to the profession (330).

General Compson is said to have had "three avatars": "the one as son of a brilliant and gallant statesman, the second as a battleleader of brave and gallant men, the third as a sort of privileged pseudo-Daniel Boone-Robinson Crusoe, who had not returned to juvenility because actually he had never left it" (330). General Compson begins the tradition of Compson men who "fail at everything [they touch] save longevity or suicide" (330). He suffers two majors losses in the Civil War, at Shiloh and Resaca.

Named for his grandfather, Quentin MacLachan Compson II is characterized as a "brilliant and gallant governor" (335), and is frequently trotted out as proof of the Compson line's success. Because of him, the Compson home is referred to as "the Governor's house" (329), a description that holds long after his death.

Jason Lycurgus Compson, or Jason Compson I, the first Compson in Yoknapatawpha, was given his "flamboyant" name by his father (328). In 1799, as an "infant," he was taken by his grandfather from Carolina to Kentucky (326). He arrived at the Indian agency in what would become Jefferson in 1811. By racing his mare against the horses of Ikkemotubbe's men, Jason I won the "solid square mile of land" that would become the Compson Domain (328).