Quentin's section, The Sound and the Fury
04/19/2006

People: Shreve, Spoade, Bland
Symbols: Time

Quentin’s mode of thinking:
-Quentin constantly interrupts himself in the middle of his sentences, like his thoughts move on too fast for him to keep up
-He keeps flashing back to pieces of advice his father has given him, such as the “reducto absurdum” (I love that phrase) bit. Quentin is very close to his father.
-Quentin seems to buy entirely into the nihilistic “reducto absurdum” thing. “The displacement of water is equal to the something of something. Reducto absurdum of all human experience, and two six-pound flat-irons weigh more than one tailor’s goose.” (pg. 90) He seems to believe that the process of gaining human knowledge is ultimately useless and that human conceptions are pointless and arbitrary (see: the watch). Any knowledge he can glean from school will only come to a reducto absurdum of human experience in the end.
-Quentin seems to have three modes: one where he perceives events as they happen and adds his own analysis and memories to them, such as the beginning of this chapter. The second mode is where he starts hearing random fragments of conversation interspersed with actions/thoughts and doesn’t bother to differentiate between who’s saying what. I think the first time this occurs is on pg. 94. This seems to recur whenever he is talking to Herbert or when Herbert is around. It also recurs in the scene when Caddy has lost her virginity (starts on pg. 150), when Caddy and Quentin are talking. It recurs when Quentin thinks about losing Caddy, either losing her virginity or losing Caddy herself to Herbert. Quentin isn’t thinking in his normal, quick, Harvard-educated manner here, but very simply. The last mode is when he tells his story in a straightforward narrative, without adding any of his own thoughts (or very little of his own thoughts) to it. This occurs when he meets the young Hispanic girl and when he’s arrested; I’m guessing this is when he has no choice but to pay attention to what’s happening around him.
-The effect of getting Quentin’s story this way is, I think, to show the rapidity with which he thinks and the connections he makes. He connects a lot of things and images together, such as the flat-iron “shoes” and the reducto absurdum connection quoted previously (pg. 90). It also shows how disjointed his mind is. His thoughts jump back and forth between what’s happening to him in whatever scene he’s thinking about and his memories of his family, especially Caddy and his parents. For Quentin, scenes are not connected by time as much as by what they mean to him. In this respect, he’s similar to Benjy, who has no sense of time and connects his memories by what they represent to him.
-Quentin tends to get lost in his own thoughts, as well, and other people are always trying to pull him back to the present. Ex. “Mrs. Bland said… I quit trying to stop it.” (pg. 147)
-Quentin has problems. Oh, yes. He’s very preoccupied with keeping both his innocence as well as Caddy’s intact. He even goes so far as to try to kick Dalton out of town when he (Dalton) has sex with Caddy, which is a rather irrational thing to do.
-Quentin defines his life by his memories of Caddy and himself, of happier times. Throughout the chapter, he thinks back to things that he and Caddy did together.
-I think that Quentin struggles with the feeling that he’s powerless; he fails to keep Caddy from growing up, getting married, and moving away, for example. He’s also a virgin, in contrast to Caddy.

Quentin’s day:
-Does Quentin spend an entire day wandering around Boston? He really is killing time.
-Quentin wakes up, visits the post office and the clock repairman, encounters the Deacon, hangs around the bridge, goes back to the post office, gets on a trolley, gets off the trolley, hangs around the bridge some more and meets the kids who are trying to fish for the trout, goes to a bakery and finds a little girl (who he tries to be nice to, although the little girl follows him—the italics and the analysis stop when he’s with the little girl), runs away from the little girl, Quentin gets arrested for “kidnapping” the girl, gets set free, goes with Mrs. Bland in the car, (thinks about the fight he got into with Dalton for a long time), gets into a fight with Bland, and goes back to his room at Harvard. He proceeds to sit in his room for about half an hour thinking back on everything that’s happened in his life, and then goes out.
-Quentin’s story seems to be just his life story, of points that were important to him. Caddy is obviously important to him, but so are his parents.
-Quentin’s story is also about growing up: Caddy has gotten married and moved away, and Quentin has failed to prevent her from doing so. There are many reasons why Quentin decides to commit suicide that go deeper than just this one reason, but this is one of the reasons.

Quentin’s memories:
-Herbert, Caddy, Mother, and Quentin driving in the car, pg. 94-95. Herbert comes off as rather smarmy if you ask me.
-Herbert himself, pg. 107. My impression of smarminess is reinforced. Herbert keeps blathering on while Quentin gives short, curt responses. Herbert identifies himself with Quentin because both of them went to Harvard, and Quentin therefore apparently comes off as refined compared to the rest of the family: “I like you Quentin I like your appearance you don’t look like these other hicks” (pg. 108). Given Quentin’s responses to Herbert, I don’t think he’s very fond of the guy. Herbert gets progressively nastier to Quentin as Quentin refuses to take his money, until Caddy comes in. (We later find out on pg. 123 that Herbert is a cheater.)
-Father vs. Mother: pg. 102. We get to see Mother dividing the family into the Compson and Bascomb camps, taking Jason with her. This segues into Mother’s rant, where she complains about being burdened with Benjy. She acts sorrowful and repentant for her “sin” of marrying Father, who she believes was above her station anyway. She also puts on a sort of martyr act about her own children turning against her (except for Jason).
-Caddy being sick and pregnant (starts on pg. 112); she says that she has to marry someone since she’s pregnant. Juxtaposed with Quentin breaking his leg and Quentin hunting with Versh.
-Quentin’s memory of Versh’s story about the man who mutilated himself. Quentin thinks about how he might have gone through with such an act himself if it hadn’t been for the fact that he’d know that he still could have had sex at one point anyway. “It’s never to have them then I could say O That That’s Chinese I don’t know Chinese.” (pg. 116) Quentin ultimately wants to remain sexless, after all, and wants to remain in a state of childlike innocence. Not having sex is one way to accomplish that.
-Quentin and Natalie in the barn. Quentin tries to carry Natalie and drops her. Caddy comes by and sees what Natalie and Quentin are doing in the barn. Natalie gets mad at Quentin and leaves him, while Quentin goes and jumps into the mud with Caddy. This recalls the scene with Caddy at the Branch before Damuddy’s funeral, when Caddy’s drawers getting muddy represents her growing up. However, here Caddy tells Quentin that she doesn’t really care about what he was doing: “I don’t give a damn…began to taste sweet on my lips.” (pg. 137) Quentin desperately wants Caddy to care about him, though, since he cares about her a great deal, so he starts fighting with Caddy.
-Caddy’s wedding; Benjy and TP getting drunk.
-Caddy losing her virginity: Quentin runs after Caddy after Benjy starts yelling at her and trying to get her to go into the bathroom and she runs away. (pg. 150) Caddy’s dress, once again, gets wet and Quentin reprimands her for it. Quentin’s sentences become kinda incoherent towards the bottom of page 150, presumably because he’s angry at whoever made Caddy less pure by having sex with her. Quentin offers to do a murder-suicide thing with Caddy, but eventually gives up and just starts crying with Caddy.
-Quentin then goes on some sort of mission to restore Caddy’s honor by meeting Dalton at the bridge (starts on pg. 159) and ends up defeated, but with Dalton’s gun. This segues into the “present day” (1910) when Quentin has just finished losing a fight to Bland. Apparently Quentin’s not the best at fighting. It turns out that Quentin, unaware of what he was saying or doing, asked Bland if he had a sister, and when Bland said no, started swinging at him. Bland was apparently holding forth on how women are only good to lie on their backs, which is about when Quentin asked him if he had a sister. Also, re-reading the chapter, apparently hearing anyone mention “running with dirty sluts” or anything of that nature (like Shreve on pg. 78) triggers this memory, as when Shreve says this Quentin asks “Did you ever have a sister?” again.
-Quentin also gets random fragments of memories that recur throughout this section, such as receiving Caddy’s wedding invitation and looking at it sitting on the table, and watching Benjy and TP drunk on Caddy’s wedding night. Another example might be Quentin’s memories of Bland/Mrs. Bland. Because these memories, to Quentin, are tied in with whatever else he’s thinking about, he refers back to them often.
-Quentin ties all his memories together while waiting in his room at the end of the chapter. The dialogue between Father and Quentin from pg. 176-78 is quite interesting. Quentin breaks it up with “and i” and “and he” to denote who’s saying what. Father’s got some pretty nihilistic views there, which have obviously rubbed off on Quentin. Quentin’s memory is of Father talking about people facing death, which is rather appropriate given what Quentin is about to do in the present day. Father says that men usually don’t want to face up to death; they try to deny it and feel remorseful, but it doesn’t matter in the end. We also don’t want to think that love/sorrows are like bonds that can be recalled at any time, but the gods can just recall them at any time. Also note the word “temporary,” another reference to time. Father says that the word “temporary” is the saddest of them all; our experiences here are only temporary, but we insist on believing in a soul, or something that’ll transcend ourselves, that will have the same state of mind as we currently do. Father seems to be saying that this is it; there’s nothing beyond this life for us, so we as people have to decide what to do for ourselves. “every man is the arbiter of his own virtues but let no man prescribe for another mans wellbeing” (pg. 178) Not only this, but Father tells Quentin that eventually he’ll get over the pain of losing Caddy, which Quentin doesn’t want to hear. Quentin can’t believe that he’ll forget Caddy or how he felt about her, since he has always tried to protect her. This seems to me like the final straw for Quentin: if he can’t believe in his memories of Caddy always having that same potency and can’t believe in how he felt about Caddy, then he has nothing left.
-In a weird way, Quentin’s trying to protect Caddy by telling people that he’s committed incest with her. He tries to keep her with him by telling Father that he’s committed incest. If people think that he and she have had an incestuous relationship, then they’ll immediately want to dissociate themselves from the two of them, which means that Quentin and Caddy can stay together in their own little happy world—the “clean flame” image. “and i it was to isolate her out of the loud world so that it would have to flee us out of necessity and then the sound of it would be as though it had never been” (pg. 177) This is supported by Quentin saying “I have committed incest I said Father it was I it was not Dalton Ames” on page 79. We know that it was in fact Dalton Ames; Caddy herself said so. But Quentin’s trying to convince everyone that because he’s telling them that he’s committed incest with Caddy, it really happened and they’ll go to hell together for having done such a thing.

Recurring Images:
-“And when He said Rise only the flat irons.” (pg. 112 and some other places) Like there will be nothing left of Quentin but the flat irons in time.
-virginity/purity: Father says that men invented virginity, that virginity means far less to women than it does to men (pg. 78). “Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature.” (pg. 116) In other words, if you’re pure, you’re lacking something. Quentin is obsessed with purity and keeping his childhood purity. He’s already failed to protect Caddy from losing hers, after all, and she’s already grown up and moved away from him.
-Quentin stepping on his shadow/trampling it. Shadows in general, such as of the sash in the beginning of the chapter.
-“One minute she was standing in the door”—Quentin uses this to refer to Caddy’s wedding, shortly after she sees Benjy and TP drunk and chases after them. Is the door some kind of threshold that Caddy has now crossed over now that she’s married?
-honeysuckle/wisteria: Caddy says that Quentin used to like honeysuckle, although now he hates it. Quentin feels that the honeysuckle is oppressive, choking him with its scent.
-the little girl: it’s probably significant that Quentin can’t seem to get rid of the little girl who follows him around town, like how the memory of his own little sister haunts him.

Quentin’s narration vs. Benjy’s narration:
-Unlike Benjy, everything means something else to Quentin. Benjy reports things at face value, while basically everything that Quentin sees or focuses on reminds him of something else.
-I believe that the italicized parts in Quentin’s section are his memories relating to Caddy.
-Quentin lives almost entirely in his own head. His memories remind him of other memories, to which he adds his own analysis and perspective, and his entire narration is based on expanding memories. Benjy lives in a concrete world of sensations and sensory experiences.
-Like Benjy, he skips around in time often, but it’s not because Quentin doesn’t know what time is. Quentin knows perfectly well what time is, he just thinks that it’s pointless to keep track of it. And Quentin doesn’t give us nice little italicized bits to tell us when he’s jumping around in time. However, Quentin does have his own logic: as I said, he lives inside his head, and memories remind him of other memories that remind him of other memories. Ex. “Then I went east. Harvard my Harvard boy Harvard harvard” (pg. 92) He connects “east” with “Harvard,” which makes sense given Harvard’s geographical location. I think if you can keep track of all of Quentin’s memories—and he has a lot of them—you’ll be able to make sense of his story.
-Both Benjy and Quentin want to protect Caddy, but they go about it in different ways. Benjy can’t communicate what he’s feeling to Caddy, so he cries at her and she understands him. He tries to protest Caddy’s growing up by protesting her use of perfume, for example. Quentin tries to protect Caddy from growing up by doing things like trying to kick Dalton out of town. Both ultimately fail, as Caddy does move away and start her own life.

People/symbols/images: see below

Shreve: Quentin's roommate. Mrs. Bland isn’t very fond of Shreve, and the feeling is mutual (pg. 106). Shreve tries to stick up for Quentin when he gets arrested and put on trial before Anse, and seems more indignant about the whole thing than Spoade does. Shreve is the one trying to keep Quentin in time—he tries to get Quentin to hurry up and go to class at the beginning of the section, for example. It almost seems like Shreve sticks up for Quentin and protects him. When Spoade teases Quentin about Shreve being Quentin’s husband, Shreve tells Quentin that at least Quentin doesn’t go running around with dirty sluts (pg. 78).

Spoade: A friend (acquaintance maybe) of Quentin’s. He doesn’t seem to be particularly bothered by time. “It was his club’s boast… never increased his pace at all.” (pg. 79) “Spoade was the world’s champion sitter-arounder, no holds barred and gouging discretionary.” (pg. 92) Another example of how Spoade is unhurried, calm, in control of time. Shreve and Spoade’s senses of time are contrasted with Quentin’s sense of time; Quentin wants to control time, but can’t.

Bland: A friend of Quentin’s working on a boat. It seems like he fought with his mother to be able to work on the boat, although Quentin implies that he always listens to her otherwise (“They said his mother… but for once he was stubborn.” pg. 91). His mom approves of him associating with Quentin because Quentin appears to have a sense of noblesse oblige. In fact, Bland’s mother follows him around everywhere. Bland is paralleled with Dalton; Quentin jumps Bland and starts hitting him when Bland makes an offhand comment about girls, the same as when Quentin jumped Dalton for making an offhand comment about Caddy. In both cases, Quentin fails to defend the women in question and gets beaten up/faints.

Father: Quentin is constantly recalling things that Father has told him, bits and pieces of advice. Shows a bit of Father’s character as well as Quentin’s: Father seems to hold rather nihilistic views about mankind and generally feels that human experiences are worthless. “Man the sum of what have you. A problem in impure properties carried tediously to an unvarying nil: stalemate of dust and desire.” (pg. 124) Quentin, for his part, is apparently rather close to his father, considering how much he remembers of what his father has told him. However, Father doesn’t appear to understand Quentin. Near the end of this section, when Quentin is telling Father that he’s committed incest with Caddy, Father tells him that his pain over Caddy’s loss will pass in time, which drives Quentin mad. Quentin, after all, is held together by his memories of Caddy; they give his life definition.

Caddy: Quentin’s relationship with Caddy is odd. He tries to protect her from growing up, like Benjy does, but in a different way. After Caddy has lost her virginity, he tries to kick Dalton out of town, which is a rather irrational move on his part. Quentin ultimately fails to make any real impact on Dalton, although luckily for Quentin Dalton humors him and allows him to think that he’s been knocked out. Quentin keeps on failing to protect Caddy, which I believe is one of the reasons why he decides to commit suicide in the present day. There is an element of sexual tension between Quentin and Caddy—the scene at the Branch after Caddy loses her virginity, for example.

Time:
-Quentin is constantly thinking about time. He has his own ways of telling time: on page 77, he says that he tells time in his room by looking at the shadow of the sash. Time seems to be a distraction for him. He knows that the human concept of keeping track of time is arbitrary, and yet is personified in the watch that his father gives him (that whole “reducto absurdum” thing). I mean, Quentin actually smashes the watch, which to me shows how he feels about the concept of keeping track of time.
-Even though Quentin doesn’t seem to like keeping track of time, he constantly notes what time it is, such as when the clocks chime the hour. He can’t escape the signals all around him that time is going on and changing.
-“Because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.” (pg. 85) There’s the idea of killing time, which is basically all Quentin does the entire day. Clocks mechanize the entire concept of time, make it cold and dead. Quentin seems like he’s trying to free himself entirely from time by not keeping track of time by methods other than what he can observe naturally and what his body tells him (pg. 104). Also, clocks just measure out how much longer you’ve got until you die: reducto absurdum of all human experience, death.
-Quentin just really wants time to stop. Time, for Quentin, is the enemy. If time stopped, he would be able to stay innocent with Caddy forever, but time can’t stop. Quentin has to grow up, and Caddy has to grow up. Perhaps one of the reasons why Quentin decides to commit suicide is so that he can have some measure of control over his life. If he commits suicide, not only will he not have to deal with the knowledge that his pain over Caddy’s loss will pass, but he’ll be able to stop time for himself.