Quentin’s section shows the thoughts and actions on the day he commits suicide. Through Quentin, Faulkner illustrates the importance of time. He is essentially trapped in the elegant time of Old South. He is obsessed with the family and the elegance of the family that he has lost. He is haunted by the memories of Caddy and how she ruined the family’s good names and ended the ideals of the time of the Old South. He believes that Caddy’s conduct has left a permanent stain on his family’s proud heritage, defiling it for all time and essentially corrupting all thoughts Quentin had of continuing the Compson’s proud past. Quentin has a sense of order in his life. This order is based on the highly ethical and moral standards of the Old South society; a society where men are meant to be gentlemen and women are meant to be ladies. Quentin believes in the ideals and ideas espoused under this traditional society. He believes that all people in this society should embrace the ideals and ideas of honor, virtue, strength, and decency, purity, modesty, and virginity.
Caddy's promiscuity affects Quentin such that he believes it is a blatant violation of the southern code he lives and stands by. He holds the code of the south very close to his heart and makes it the base and standards of how he lives. When Caddy's licentious behavior breaks this code that Quentin lives by, he attempts to maintain his sense of order by embarking on one of the only things he can conceive as honorable at this point. He believes that suicide is the one of the last honorable ways to rescue the family’s reputation. Quentin tells Caddy that they should both commit suicide, together. She refuses this so he offers to do the last thing he believes is honorable and offers to take accountability for the child’s fathering, while this is a lie which would go against the code of the south, he believes that a lie is more honorable than her being seen as a promiscuous young lady and a single mother. The fact that he has to decide between which two feats are less honorable shows that Caddy has ruined his thoughts of a perfectly admirable family and a reclamation of the code of the Old South.
Faulkner illustrates the tone of Jason’s section with the opening sentence: “Once a bitch, always a bitch, what I say.”(Faulkner 113) Jason has grown into a dark and sinister man through his dealings with his own family. Jason's chapter is a clear, concise, rapid, cruel and entirely emotionless depiction of the Compson family’s ordeals. His narrative is extremely easy to read compared to the narratives of Benjy’s idiotic ramblings and Quentin’s complex mind. It helps expose a number of key plot details that the previous chapters have simply implied. Jason substantiates that Benjy has been castrated, that Quentin had killed himself by drowning, and that Caddy was now divorced. Even though his narrative is a relief from the confusing narrative of previous speakers, his section is disconcerting in its lucid depiction of the hatred and cruelty with which Jason controls the Compson family. Though he is the smartest, most cunning and clever child of the Compson family, Jason uses his talents for evil rather than good. He yields to his own self-hatred and self-pity, while wallowing in a sense that he was victim of Caddy’s divorce from Herbert Head. “The bitch that cost me a job, the one chance I ever had to get ahead.”(Faulkner 142)
Jason’s childhood resentment for Caddy only intensifies when he begins to believe that her divorce cost him the job at Herbert's bank, but he fails to realize that without her marriage to Herbert Head in the beginning, there would be no job opportunity to lose. The effortless malice Jason displayed in his childhood has only exaggerated during his adulthood. He takes satisfaction in distress of all those around him and uses the fact that because he has been wronged in the past, that now he is always right and nothing he does should ever be questioned or contested.
The fact that Jason has become the new leader of the Compson house shows that the family has now depressed to an all-time low. Jason is barely cut from the same cloth as the ancestors who gave the Compson name the honor and prestige it had before. “While his grandfather was a Civil War general and his great-grandfather was the governor of Mississippi, Jason is a simple clerk in a farm-supply store and makes most of his money by stealing from Caddy’s daughter, Miss Quentin.”(Matthews 373) Jason is wholly focused on the present and the future, which while normally would be a positive feeling; in Jason’s case it is exactly the opposite. Jason only focuses on the present and future because he has no use for the past, and the only past he remembers concentrate on the effect those events have on him here and now. For example, “Jason dwells on Caddy's divorce, only because it has left him in a menial and unfulfilling job.”(Jehlen 319)
All of the Compson’s losses can be directly traced back to Caddy. Whether it be her leaving the family, her promiscuous and immoral behavior, or her marriage and divorce from Herbert Head, she indubitably affects the lives, thoughts, actions and mindsets of her three brothers. She brings them all pain and suffering, even though she does not meaningfully cause any such misery on any of them. “Caddy is the veritable centerpiece of and she played a different role in the eyes of her three brothers: a caring, maternal figure to , a virgin/whore who upset his sense of the propriety of Southern womanhood to , and an object of envy and detestation, who ruined his one chance at success, to .”(Padgett)
Works Cited
Jehlen, Myra. "Faulkner’s Fiction and Southern Society." The Sound and The Fury: A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1994. 317-325.
Matthews, John T. "The Discovery of Loss." The Sound and The Fury: A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1994. 370-393.
Padgett, John B. The Sound and The Fury: Commentary. 9 Oct. 2000. Ole Miss University. 9 Nov. 2002 <http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/faulkner/n-sf.html>.
William, Faulkner. The Sound and The Fury. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1994. 1-199.
