Summary of April Seventh, 1928:
This section of the book is commonly referred to as "Benjy's section"
because it is narrated by the retarded youngest son of the Compson family,
Benjamin Compson. At this point in the story, Benjy is 33 years old - in
fact, today is his birthday - but the story skips back and forth in time as
various events trigger memories. When the reader first plunges into this
narrative, the jumps in time are difficult to navigate or understand,
although many scenes are marked by recurring images, sounds, or words. In
addition, a sort of chronology can be established depending on who is
Benjy's caretaker: first Versh when Benjy is a child, then T. P. when he is
an adolescent, then Luster when he is an adult. One other fact that may
confuse first-time readers is the repetition of names. There are, for
example, two Jasons (father and son), two Quentins (Benjy's brother and
Caddy's daughter), and two Mauries (Benjy himself before 1900 and Benjy's
uncle). Benjy recalls three important events: the evening of his
grandmother "Damuddy's" death in 1898, his name change in 1900, and Caddy's
sexual promiscuity and wedding in 1910, although these events are
punctuated by other memories, including the delivery of a letter to his
uncle's mistress in 1902 or 1903, Caddy's wearing perfume in 1906, a
sequence of events at the gate of the house in 1910 and 1911 that
culminates in his castration, Quentin's death in 1910, his father's death
and funeral in 1912, and Roskus's death some time after this. I will
summarize each event briefly.
The events of the present day (4/7/28) center around Luster's search for a
quarter he has lost somewhere on the property. He received this quarter
from his grandmother Dilsey in order to go to the circus that evening.
Luster takes Benjy with him as he searches by the golf course that used to
be the Compson's pasture, by the carriage house, down by the branch of the
Yoknapatawpha River, and finally near Benjy's "graveyard" of jimson flowers
in a bottle.
As the story opens, Benjy and Luster are by the golf course, where the
golfers' cries of "caddie" cause Benjy to "beller" because he mistakes
their cries for his missing sister Caddy's name. In the branch, Luster
finds a golfer's ball, which he later tries to sell to the golfers; they
accuse him of stealing it and take it from him. Luster tries to steer Benjy
away from the swing, where Miss Quentin and her "beau" (one of the
musicians from the circus) are sitting, but is unsuccessful. Quentin is
furious and runs into the house, while her friend jokes with Luster and
asks him who visits Quentin. Luster replies that there are too many male
visitors to distinguish.
Luster takes Benjy past the fence, where Benjy sees schoolgirls passing
with their satchels. Benjy moans whenever Luster tries to break from the
routine path Benjy is used to. At Benjy's "graveyard," Luster disturbs the
arrangement of flowers in the blue bottle, causing Benjy to cry. At this
Luster becomes frustrated and says "beller. You want something to beller
about. All right, then. Caddy. . . . Caddy. Beller now. Caddy" (55).
Benjy's crying summons Dilsey, Luster's grandmother, who scolds him for
making Benjy cry and for disturbing Quentin. They go in the kitchen, where
Dilsey opens the oven door so Benjy can watch the fire. Dilsey has bought
Benjy a birthday cake, and Luster blows out the candles, making Benjy cry
again. Luster teases him by closing the oven door so that the fire "goes
away." Dilsey scolds Luster again. Benjy is burned when he tries to touch
the fire. His cries disturb his mother, who comes to the kitchen and
reprimands Dilsey. Dilsey gives him an old slipper to hold, an object that
he loves.
Luster takes Benjy to the library, where his cries disturb Jason, who comes
to the door and yells at Luster. Luster asks Jason for a quarter. At
dinner, Jason interrogates Quentin about the man she was with that
afternoon and threatens to send Benjy to an asylum in Jackson. Quentin
threatens to run away, and she and Jason fight. She runs out of the room.
Benjy goes to the library, where Luster finds him and shows him that
Quentin has given him a quarter. Luster dresses Benjy for bed; when Benjy's
pants are off he looks down and cries when he is reminded of his
castration. Luster puts on his nightgown and the two of them watch as
Quentin climbs out her window and down a tree. Luster puts Benjy to bed.
Benjy's memories, in chronological order:
Damuddy's death, 1898: Benjy is three years old and his name at this point
is still Maury. Caddy is seven, Quentin is older (nine?) and Jason is
between seven and three.
The four children are playing in the branch of the river. Roskus calls them
to supper, but Caddy refuses to come. She squats down in the river and gets
her dress wet; Versh tells her that her mother will whip her for that.
Caddy asks Versh to help her take her dress off, and Quentin warns him not
to. Caddy takes off her dress and Quentin hits her. The two of them fight
in the branch and get muddy. Caddy says that she will run away, which makes
Maury/Benjy cry; she immediately takes it back. Roskus asks Versh to bring
the children to the house, and Versh puts Caddy's dress back on her.
They head up to the house, but Quentin stays behind, throwing rocks into
the river. The children notice that all the lights are on in the house and
assume that their parents are having a party. Father tells the children to
be quiet and to eat dinner in the kitchen; he won't tell them why they have
to be quiet. Caddy asks him to tell the other children to mind her for the
evening, and he does. The children hear their mother crying, which makes
Maury/Benjy cry. Quentin is also agitated by her crying, but Caddy
reassures him that she is just singing. Jason too begins to cry.
The children go outside and down to the servants' quarters, where Frony and
T. P. (who are children at this point) have a jar of lightning bugs. Frony
asks about the funeral, and Versh scolds her for mentioning it. The
children discuss the only death they know - when their mare Nancy died and
the buzzards "undressed her" in a ditch. Caddy asks T. P. to give
Maury/Benjy his jar of lightning bugs to hold. The children go back up to
the house and stop outside the parlor window. Caddy climbs up a tree to see
in the window, and the children watch her muddy drawers as she climbs.
Dilsey comes out of the house and yells at them. Caddy tells the others
that their parents were not doing anything inside, although she may be
trying to protect them from the truth. The children go inside and upstairs.
Father comes to help tuck them into bed in a strange room. Dilsey dresses
them and tucks them in, and they go to sleep.
Benjy's name change, 1900: Benjy is five years old, Caddy is nine, etc.
Benjy is sitting by the library fire and watching it. Dilsey and Caddy
discuss Benjy's new name; Dilsey wants to know why his parents have changed
it, and Caddy replies that mother said Benjamin was a better name for him
than Maury was. Dilsey says that "folks don't have no luck, changing names"
(58). Caddy brings Benjy to where her mother is lying in the bedroom with a
cloth on her head, to say good night. Benjy can hear the clock ticking and
the rain falling on the roof. Mother chides Caddy not to carry him because
he is too heavy and will ruin her posture. She holds Benjy's face in her
hands and repeats "Benjamin" over and over. Benjy cries until Caddy holds
his favorite cushion over his mother's head. She leads him to the fire so that he can watch it. Father picks him up,
and he watches the reflection of Caddy and Jason fighting in the library
mirror. Father puts him down and breaks up Caddy and Jason, who are
fighting because Jason cut up all of Benjy's paper dolls. Father takes
Jason to the room next door and spanks him. They all sit by the fire, and
Benjy holds his cushion. Quentin comes and sits next to them. He has been
in a fight at school and has a bruise. Father asks him about it. Versh sits
next to them and tells them a story about a "bluegum" he knows who changed
his name too. Father tells him to be quiet. Caddy and Versh feed Benjy his
dinner, and the four children sit in father's lap. Benjy says that Caddy
and Quentin smell like trees and rain.
Versh, Caddy and Benjy go outside, December 23, 1902: Benjy is seven years
old and Caddy is eleven.
Benjy is crying because he wants to go outside. Mother says it is too cold
for him and he will freeze his hands. She says that if he won't be quiet he
will have to go to the kitchen. Versh replies that Dilsey wants him out of
the kitchen because she has a lot of cooking to do, and Uncle Maury tells
her to let him go outside. Versh puts on his coat and they go outside;
Versh tells him to keep his hands in his pockets. Caddy comes through the
gate, home from school. She takes his hands and they run through the fallen
leaves into the house. Caddy puts him by the fire, and Versh starts to take
his coat off, but Caddy asks if she can take him outside again. Versh puts
on his overshoes again, and mother takes his face in her hands and calls
him "my poor baby," but Caddy kneels by him and tells him that he is not a
poor baby at all because he has her. Benjy notices that she smells like
trees.
Caddy and Benjy deliver Uncle Maury's letter to Mrs. Patterson, December
25, 1902.
Caddy and Benjy cross the yard by the barn, where the servants are killing
a pig for dinner. Caddy tells Benjy to keep his hands in his pockets and
lets him hold the letter. She wonders why Uncle Maury did not send Versh
with the letter. They cross the frozen branch and come to the Patterson's
fence. Caddy takes the letter and climbs the fence to deliver it. Mrs.
Patterson comes out of the house.
Benjy delivers a letter to Mrs. Patterson alone, spring 1903: Benjy is
eight years old.
Benjy is at the Patterson's fence. Mr. Patterson is in the garden cutting
flowers. Mrs. Patterson runs from the house to the fence, and Benjy cries
when he sees her angry eyes. She says that she told Maury not to send Benjy
alone again, and asks Benjy to give her the letter. Mr. Patterson comes
running, climbs the fence and takes the letter. Benjy runs away.
Caddy wears perfume, 1906: Benjy is ten years old and Caddy is fourteen.
Caddy tries to hug Benjy but he cries and pushes her away. Jason says that
he must not like her "prissy dress," and says that she thinks she is all
grown up just because she is fourteen. Caddy tries to hush Benjy, but he
disturbs their mother, who calls them to her room. Mother tells Caddy to
give Benjy his box full of cut-out stars. Caddy walks to the bathroom and
washes the perfume off. Benjy goes to the door. Caddy opens the door and
hugs him; she smells like trees again. They go into Caddy's room and she
sits at her mirror. Benjy starts to cry again. She gives him the bottle of
perfume to smell and he runs away, crying. She realizes what made him cry
and tells him she will never wear it again. They go to the kitchen, and
Caddy tells Dilsey that the perfume is a present from Benjy to her. Dilsey
takes the bottle, and Caddy says that "we don't like perfume ourselves"
(43).
Caddy in the swing, 1907?: Benjy is eleven or twelve and Caddy is fifteen
or sixteen.
Benjy is out in the yard at night. T. P. calls for him through the window.
He watches the swing, where there are "two now, then one in the swing"
(47). Caddy comes running to him, asking how he got out. She calls for T.
P. Benjy cries and pulls at her dress. Charlie, the boy she is with on the
swing, comes over and asks where T. P. is. Benjy cries and she tells
Charlie to go away. He goes, and she calls for T. P. again. Charlie comes
back and puts his hands on Caddy. She tells him to stop, because Benjy can
see, but he doesn't. She says she has to take Benjy to the house. She takes
his hand and they run to the house and up the porch steps. She hugs him,
and they go inside. Charlie is calling her, but she goes to the kitchen
sink and scrubs her mouth with soap. Benjy sees that she smells like trees
again.
Benjy sleeps alone for the first time, 1908: Benjy is thirteen years old.
Dilsey tells Benjy that he is too old to sleep with anyone else, and that
he will sleep in Uncle Maury's room. Uncle Maury has a black eye and a
swollen mouth, and Father says that he is going to shoot Mr. Patterson.
Mother scolds him and father apologizes. He is drunk.
Dilsey puts Benjy to bed alone, but he cries, and Dilsey comes back. Then
Caddy comes in and lies in the bed with him. She smells like trees. Dilsey
says she will leave the light on in Caddy's room so she can go back there
after Benjy has fallen asleep.
Caddy loses her virginity, 1909: Benjy is fourteen years old and Caddy is
eighteen.
Caddy walks quickly past the door where mother, father, and Benjy are.
Mother calls her in, and she comes to the door. She glances at Benjy, then
glances away. He begins to cry. He goes to her and pulls at her dress,
crying. She is against the wall, and she starts to cry. He chases her up
the stairs, crying. She stops with her back against the wall, crying, and
looks at him with her hand on her mouth. Benjy pushes her into the
bathroom.
Caddy's wedding, 1910: Benjy is fifteen years old and Caddy is nineteen.
Benjy, Quentin, and T. P. are outside the barn, and T. P. has given Benjy
some sarsaparilla to drink; they are both drunk. Quentin pushes T. P. into
the pig trough. They fight, and T. P. pushes Benjy into the trough. Quentin
beats T. P., who can't stop laughing. He keeps saying "whooey!". Versh
comes and yells at T. P. Quentin gives Benjy some more sarsaparilla to
drink, and he cries. T. P. takes him to the cellar, and then goes to a tree
outside the parlor. T. P. drinks some more. He gets a box for Benjy to
stand on so he can see into the parlor. Through the window, Benjy can see
Caddy in her wedding veil, and he cries out, trying to call to her. T. P.
tries to quiet him. Benjy falls down and hits his head on the box. T. P.
drags him to the cellar to get more sarsaparilla, and they fall down the
stairs into the cellar. They climb up the stairs and fall against the fence
and the box. Benjy is crying loudly, and Caddy comes running. Quentin also
comes and begins kicking T. P. Caddy hugs Benjy, but she doesn't smell like
trees any more, and Benjy begins to cry.
Benjy at the gate crying, 1910.
Benjy is in the house looking at the gate and crying, and T. P. tells him
that no matter how hard he cries, Caddy is not coming back.
Later, Benjy stands at the gate crying, and watches some schoolgirls pass
by with their satchels. Benjy howls at them, trying to speak, and they run
by. Benjy runs along the inside of the fence next to them to the end of his
yard. T. P. comes to get him and scolds him for scaring the girls.
Quentin's death, 1910.
Benjy is lying in T. P.'s bed at the servants' quarters, where T. P. is
throwing sticks into a fire. Dilsey and Roskus discuss Quentin's death
without mentioning his name or Caddy's name. Roskus talks about the curse
on the family, saying "aint the sign of it laying right there on that bed.
Aint the sign of it been here for folks to see fifteen years now" (29).
Dilsey tells him to be quiet, but he continues, saying that there have been
two signs now (Benjy's retardation and Quentin's death), and that there
would be one more. Dilsey warns him not to mention Caddy's name. He replies
that "they aint no luck on this place" (29). Dilsey tucks Benjy into T.
P.'s bed and pulls the covers up.
Benjy attacks a girl outside the gate and is castrated, 1911: Benjy is
sixteen years old.
Benjy is standing at the gate crying, and the schoolgirls come by. They
tell each other that he just runs along the inside of the fence and can't
catch them. He unlatches the gate and chases them, trying to talk to them.
They scream and run away. He catches one girl and tries to talk to her,
perhaps tries to rape her.
Later, father talks about how angry Mr. Burgess (her father) is, and wants
to know how Benjy got outside the gate. Jason says that he bets father will
have to send Benjy to the asylum in Jackson now, and father tells him to
hush.
Mr. Compson's death, 1912: Benjy is seventeen.
Benjy wakes up and T. P. brings him into the kitchen where Dilsey is
singing. She stops singing when Benjy begins to cry. She tells T. P. to
take him outside, and they go to the branch and down by the barn. Roskus is
in the barn milking a cow, and he tells T. P. to finish milking for him
because he can't use his right hand any more. He says again that there is
no luck on this place.
Later that day, Dilsey tells T. P. to take Benjy and the baby girl Quentin
down to the servants' quarters to play with Luster, who is still a child.
Frony scolds Benjy for taking a toy away from Quentin, and brings them up
to the barn. Roskus is watching T. P. milk a cow.
Later, T. P. and Benjy are down by the ditch where Nancy's bones are. Benjy
can smell father's death. T. P. takes Benjy and Quentin to his house, where
Roskus is sitting next to the fire. He says "that's three, thank the Lawd .
. . I told you two years ago. They aint no luck on this place" (31). He
comments on the bad luck of never mentioning a child's mother's name and
bringing up a child never to know its mother. Dilsey shushes him, asking
him if he wants to make Benjy cry again. Dilsey puts him to bed in Luster's
bed, laying a piece of wood between him and Luster.
Mr. Compson's funeral, 1912.
Benjy and T. P. wait at the corner of the house and watch Mr. Compson's
casket carried by. Benjy can see his father lying there through the glass
in the casket.
Trip to the cemetery, 1912.
Benjy waits for his mother to get into the carriage. She comes out and asks
where Roskus is. Dilsey says that he can't move his arms today, so T. P.
will drive them. Mother says she is afraid to let T. P. drive, but she gets
in the carriage anyway. Mother says that maybe it would be for the best if
she and Benjy were killed in an accident, and Dilsey tells her not to talk
that way. Benjy begins to cry and Dilsey gives him a flower to hold. They
begin to drive, and mother says she is afraid to leave the baby Quentin at
home. She asks T. P. to turn the carriage around. He does, and it tips
precariously but doesn't topple. They return to the house, where Jason is
standing outside with a pencil behind his ear. Mother tells him that they
are going to the cemetery, and he asks her if that was all she came back to
tell him. She says she would feel safer if he came, and he tells her that
Father and Quentin won't hurt her. This makes her cry, and Jason tells her
to stop. Jason tells T. P. to drive, and they take off again.
Roskus's death, later 1920s: Luster is old enough to take care of Benjy by
now.
Dilsey is "moaning" at the servants' quarters. Benjy begins to cry and the
dog begins to howl, and Dilsey stops moaning. Frony tells Luster to take
them down to the barn, but Luster says he won't go down there for fear he
will see Roskus's ghost like he did last night, waving his arms.
Analysis of April 7, 1928:
The title of this novel comes from Shakespeare's Macbeth, Act five, scene
five, in Macbeth's famous speech about the meaninglessness of life. He
states that it is "a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, /
signifying nothing." One could argue that Benjy is the "idiot" referred to
in this speech, for indeed his section seems, at first reading, to "signify
nothing." No one vignette in his narrative seems to be particularly
important, much of it detailing the minutiae of his daily routine. His
speech itself, the "bellering" with which me makes himself heard, does, in
fact, "signify nothing," since he is unable to express himself even when he
wants to in a way other than howling. However, Benjy Compson is not merely
an idiot, and his section is much more meaningful than it first seems.
When discussing Mr. Compson's death, Roskus states that Benjy "know a lot
more than folks thinks" (31), and in fact, for all his idiocy, Benjy does
sense when things are wrong with his self-contained world, especially when
they concern his sister Caddy. Like an animal, Benjy can "smell" when Caddy
has changed; when she wears perfume, he states that she no longer smells
"like trees," and the servants claim that he can smell death. He can also
sense somehow when Caddy has lost her virginity; she has changed to him.
From the time she loses her virginity on, she no longer smells like trees
to him. Although his section at first presents itself as an objective
snapshot of a retarded boy's perceptions of the world, it is more ordered
and more intelligent than that.
Most of the memories Benjy relates in his section have to do with Caddy,
and specifically with moments of loss related to Caddy. The first memory of
Damuddy's death, for example, marks a change in his family structure and a
change in his brother Jason, who was the closest to Damuddy and slept in
her room. His many memories of Caddy are mostly concerned with her
sexuality, a fact that changes her relationship with him and eventually
removes her from his life. His later memories are also associated with some
sort of loss: the loss of his pasture, of his father, and the loss
associated with his castration. Critics have pointed out that Benjy's
narrative is "timeless," that he cannot distinguish between present and
past and therefore relives his memories as they occur to him. If this is
the case, he is caught in a process of constantly regenerating his sister
in memory and losing her simultaneously, of creating and losing at the same
time. His life is a constant cycle of loss and degenerative change.
If Benjy is trapped in a constantly replaying succession of losses, the
objects that he fixates on seem to echo this state. He loves fire, for
instance, and often stares into the "bright shapes" of the fire while the
world revolves around him. The word "fire" is mentioned numerous times in
the memory of his name change. Caddy and the servants know that he stops
crying when he looks at the fire, which is the reason in the present day
that Luster makes a fire in the library even though one is not needed.
The fire is a symbolic object; it is conventionally associated with the
contrast between light and dark, heat and cold. It is a comfort, not merely
to Benjy because of the pleasure he receives in watching it, but because it
is associated with the hearth, the center of the home. As critics have
pointed out, it is often Caddy who places Benjy in front of the fire: "she
led me to the fire and I looked at the bright, smooth shapes" (64). The
fire is therefore tied in Benjy's mind with the idea of Caddy; both are
warm and comforting forces within a cold family. But unlike Caddy, the fire
is unchanging; there will always be a fire, even after she leaves him. The
fact that Benjy burns himself on the kitchen stove after Luster closes the
oven door reveals the pain - both physical and mental - that Benjy
associates with Caddy's absence.
Another object that provides comfort to Benjy is the library mirror. Like
the fire, the mirror plays a large part in the memory of his name change,
as Benjy watches the various members of his family move in and out of the
mirror: "Caddy and Jason were fighting in the mirror . we could see Caddy
fighting in the mirror and Father put me down and went into the mirror and
fought too . He rolled into the corner, out of the mirror. Father brought
Caddy to the fire. They were all out of the mirror" (64-65). The mirror is
a frame of reference through which Benjy sees the world; people are either
in or out of the mirror, and he does not understand the concept of
reflection. Like the mirror, Benjy's section of the book provides readers
with a similar exact reflection of the world that Benjy sees, framed by his
memories. Characters slide in and out of the mirror of his perception,
their conversations and actions accurately reported but somewhat distorted
in the process.
As the "tale told by an idiot," Benjy's section makes up the center kernel
of the story of the Compson family tragedy. And the scene of Damuddy's
death in many ways makes up the center around which this section and the
entire story revolve. Faulkner has said that the story grew out of the
image of a little girl's muddy drawers as she climbs a tree to look into
the parlor windows at the funeral taking place. From this image a story
evolved, a story "without plot, of some children being sent away from the
house during the grandmother's funeral. There were too young to be told
what was going on and they saw things only incidentally to the childish
games they were playing" (Millgate, 96). This original story was entitled
"Twilight," and the story grew into a novel because Faulkner fell in love
with the character of this little girl to such an extent that he strove to
tell her story from four different viewpoints.
If this one scene is the center of the story, it is also a microcosm of the
events to follow. The interactions of the children in this scene prefigure
their relations in the future and in fact the entire future of the Compson
family. Thus Caddy's soaking her dress in the water of the branch is a
metaphor for the sexual fall that will torment Quentin and ruin the family:
She was wet. We were playing in the branch and Caddy squatted down and got
her dress wet and Versh said, "Your mommer going to whip you for getting
your dress wet."
"It's not wet." Caddy said. She stood up in the water and looked at her
dress. "I'll take it off." she said. "Then it'll be dry."
"I bet you won't." Quentin said.
"I bet I will." Caddy said.
"I bet you better not." Quentin said.
"You just take your dress off," Quentin said. Caddy took her dress off and
threw it on the bank. Then she didn't have on anything but her bodice and
drawers, and Quentin slapped her and she slipped and fell down in the water
(17-18).
Caddy sullies her garments in an act that prefigures her later sexuality.
She then takes off her dress, a further sexual metaphor, causing Quentin to
become enraged and slap her. Just as the loss of her virginity upsets
Quentin to the point of suicide, his angry and embarrassed reaction to
taking off her dress here reveals the jealous protectiveness he feels for
her sexuality. Benjy, too, is traumatized by the muddying of Caddy's dress:
"Caddy was all wet and muddy behind, and I started to cry and she came and
squatted in the water" (19). Just as her sexuality will cause his world to
crack later on, her muddy dress here causes him to cry.
Jason, too, is a miniature version of what he will become in this scene.
While Caddy and Quentin fight in the branch, Jason stands "by himself
further down the branch," prefiguring the isolation from the rest of his
family that will characterize his later existence (19). Although the other
children ask him not to tell their father that they have been playing in
the branch, the first thing he does when he sees father is tattle. He is as
perverse and mean here as he is sadistic in the third section of the book.
His reaction to Damuddy's death, too, is a miniature for the way he will
deal with the loss that he sees in Caddy's betrayal of the family later on:
"Do you think the buzzards are going to undress Damuddy." Caddy said.
"You're crazy."
"You're a skizzard." Jason said. He began to cry.
"You're a knobnot." Caddy said. Jason cried. His hands were in his pockets.
"Jason going to be rich man." Versh said. "He holding his money all the
time" (35-36).
Here Jason cries over the loss of Damuddy with his hands in his pockets,
"holding his money," just as later he will sublimate his anger at Caddy's
absence by becoming a miserly workaholic and embezzling thousands of
dollars from Quentin and his mother.
The scene ends with the image of Caddy's muddy drawers as she climbs the
tree: "We watched the muddy bottom of her drawers. Then we couldn't see
her. We could hear the tree thrashing . . . . the tree quit thrashing. We
looked up into the still branches" (39). This image of Caddy's muddy
undergarments disappearing into the branches of the tree, the scene that
prompted Faulkner to write the entire novel, is, as critic John T. Matthews
points out, an image of Caddy disappearing, just as she will disappear from
the lives of her three brothers:
What the novel has made, it has also lost . . . . [Caddy] is memorable
precisely because she inhabits the memories of her brothers and the novel,
and memory for Faulkner never transcends the sense of loss . . . . Caught
in Faulkner's mind as she climbs out of the book, Caddy is the figure that
the novel is written to lose (Matthews, 2-3). Thus the seminal scene in
this section of the story is that of the sullied Caddy, "climbing out of"
Benjy's life.
The scene of Damuddy's death is not the only part of this section that
forecasts the future. Like a Greek tragedy, this section is imbued with a
sense of impending disaster, and in fact the events of the present day
chronicle a family that has fallen into decay. For Benjy, the dissolution
of the life he knows is wrapped up in Caddy and her sexuality, which
eventually leads her to desert him. For his mother and the servants, the
family's demise is a fate that cannot be avoided, of which Benjy's idiocy
and Quentin's death are signs. This is what prompts Roskus to repeatedly
vow that "they aint no luck on this place," and what causes mother to
perform the almost ritualistic ablution of changing Benjy's name. It is as
if changing his name from Maury, the name of a Bascomb, will somehow avert
the disastrous fate that the Compson blood seems to bring. This
overwhelming sense of an inescapable family curse will resurface many times
throughout the book.
Summary of June Second, 1910:
This section of the book details the events of the day of Quentin's
suicide, from the moment he wakes in the morning until he leaves his room
that night, headed to the river to drown himself. Like Benjy's section,
this section is narrated in stream of consciousness, sliding constantly
between modern-day events and memories; however, Quentin's section is not
as disjointed at Benjy's, regardless of his agitated mental state. As with
Benjy, most of the memories he relates are centered on Caddy and her
precocious sexuality.
The present day:
Quentin wakes in his Harvard dorm room to the sound of his watch ticking:
"when the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtain it was between seven
and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch" (76).
This is the watch his father gave him when he came to Harvard. He tries to
ignore the sound, but the more he tries, the louder it seems. He turns the
watch over and returns to bed, but the ticking goes on. His roommate Shreve
appears in the doorway and asks him if he is going to chapel, then runs out
the door to avoid being late himself. Quentin watches his friends running
to chapel out the window of his dorm room, then listens to the school's
bell chiming the hour (8:00 a.m.).
He goes to the dresser and picks up his watch, tapping it against the side
of the dresser to break the glass. He twists the hands of the watch off,
but the watch keeps ticking. He notices that he cut himself in the process
and meticulously cleans his wound with iodine. He painstakingly packs up
all his clothes except two suits, two pairs of shoes, and two hats, then
locks his trunk and piles his schoolbooks on the sitting-room table, as the
quarter-hour bell chimes.
He bathes and puts on a new suit and his (now broken) watch, puts his trunk
key into an envelope addressed to his father, then writes two noes and
seals them. He goes out the door, bumping into his returning roommate on
the way, who asks him why he is all dressed up. The half-hour chimes and
Quentin walks into Harvard Square, to the post office. He buys stamps and
mails one letter to his father and keeps one for Shreve in his coat pocket.
He is looking for his friend "the Deacon," an eccentric black man who
befriends all the Southern students at Harvard. He goes out to breakfast;
while he is eating he hears the clock strike the hour (10:00 a.m.).
Quentin continues to walk around the square, trying to avoid looking at
clocks, but finds it impossible to escape time like that. He eventually
walks into a jeweler's and asks him about fixing his watch. He asks if any
of the watches in the window is right, and stops the jeweler before he can
tell him what time it is. The jeweler says that he will fix his watch this
afternoon, but Quentin takes it back and says he will get it fixed later.
Walking back out into the street, he buys two six-pound flat-irons; he
chooses them because they are "heavy enough" but will look like a pair of
shoes when they are wrapped up and he is carrying them around the Square
(85).
He takes a fruitless cable car ride, then gets off the car on a bridge,
where he watches one of his friends rowing on the river. He walks back to
the Square as the bell chimes the quarter hour (11:15), and he meets up
with the Deacon and gives him the letter he has written to Shreve, asking
him to deliver it tomorrow. He tells the Deacon that when he delivers the
letter tomorrow Shreve will have a present for him. As the bell chimes the
half-hour, he runs into Shreve, who tells him a letter arrived for him this
morning. Then he gets on another car as the bells chime 11:45.
When he gets off the car he is near a run-down town on the Charles River,
and he walks along the river until he comes across three boys fishing on a
bridge over the river; he hides the flat irons under the edge of the bridge
before striking up a conversation with the boys. They notice that he has a
strange accent and ask if he is from Canada; he asks them if there are any
factories in town (factories would have hourly whistles). He walks on
toward the town, although he is anxious to keep far enough away from the
church steeple's clock to render its face unreadable. Finally he arrives in
town and walks into a bakery; there is nobody behind the counter, but there
is a little Italian immigrant girl standing before it. A woman enters
behind the counter and Quentin buys two buns. He tells the proprietress
that the little girl would like something too; the proprietress eyes the
girl suspiciously and accuses her of stealing something.
Quentin defends her and she extends her hand to reveal a nickel. The woman
wraps up a five-cent loaf of bread for the girl, and Quentin puts some
money on the counter and buys another bun as well. The woman asks him if he
is going to give the bun to the girl, and he says he is. Still acting
exasperated, she goes into a back room and comes out with a misshapen cake;
she gives it to the girl, telling her it won't taste any different than a
good cake. The girl follows Quentin out of the store, and he takes her to a
drugstore and buys her some ice cream. They leave the drugstore and he
gives her one of the buns and says goodbye, but she continues to follow
him. Not knowing exactly what to do, he walks with her toward the immigrant
neighborhood across the train tracks where he assumes she lives. She will
not talk to him or indicate where she lives. He asks some men in front of a
store if they know her, and they do, but they don't know where she lives
either. They tell him to take her to the town marshal's office, but when he
does the marshal isn't there.
Quentin decides to take her down to her neighborhood and hopefully someone
will claim her. At one point she seems to tell him that a certain house is
hers, but the woman inside doesn't know her. They continue to walk through
the neighborhood until they come out on the other side, by the river.
Quentin gives a coin to the girl, then runs away from her along the river.
He walks along the river for a while, then suddenly meets up with the
little girl again. They walk along together for a while, still looking for
her house; eventually they turn back and walk toward town again. They come
across some boys swimming, and the boys throw water at them. The hurry
toward town, but the girl still won't tell him where she lives. Suddenly a man flies at them and attacks Quentin; he is the little girl's
brother. He has the town marshal with him, and they take him into town to
talk to the police because they think he was trying to kidnap the girl. In
town they meet up with Shreve, Spoade and Gerald, Quentin's friends, who
have come into town in Gerald's mother's car. Eventually after discussing
everything at length, the marshal lets Quentin go, and he gets into the car
with his friends and drives away.
As they drive Quentin slides into a kind of trance wherein he remembers
various events from his past, mostly to do with her precocious sexuality
(to be discussed later). While his is lost in this reverie the boys and
Gerald's mother have gotten out of the car and set up a picnic. Suddenly he
comes to, bleeding, and the boys tell him that he just suddenly began
punching Gerald and Gerald beat him up. They tell him that he began
shouting "did you ever have a sister? Did you?" then attacked Gerald out of
the blue. Quentin is more concerned about the state of his clothes than
anything else. His friends want to take the cable car back to Boston
without Gerald, but Quentin tells them he doesn't want to go back. They ask
him what he plans to do (perhaps they suspect something about his suicidal
plans). They go back to the party, and Quentin walks slowly toward the city
as the twilight descends.
Eventually Quentin gets on a cable car. Although it is dark by now, he can
smell the water of the river as they pass by it. As they pass the Harvard
Square post office again, he hears the clock chiming but has no idea what
time it is. He plans to return to the bridge where he left his flatirons,
but he has to wash his clothes first in order to carry out his plans
correctly. He returns to his dorm room and takes off his clothes,
meticulously washing the blood off his vest with gasoline. The bell chimes
the half-hour as he does so. Back in his darkened room, he looks out the
window for a while, then as the last chime of the three-quarters hour
sounds, he puts his clothes and vest back on. He walks into Shreve's room
and puts a letter and his watch in the desk drawer. He remembers that he
hasn't brushed his teeth, so he goes back into his room and takes the
toothbrush out of his bag. He brushes his teeth and returns the brush to
the bag, then goes to the door. He returns for his hat, then leaves the
room.
Quentin's memories:
Quentin's memories are not as clearly defined or as chronologically
discernible as Benjy's. There are three important memories that obsess him.
Benjy's name change, 1900: Dilsey claims that Benjy can "smell what you
tell him;" Roskus asks if he can smell bad luck, sure that the only reason
they changed his name is to try to help his luck.
Quentin kisses Natalie, undated: Natalie, a neighbor girl, and Quentin are
in the barn and it is raining outside. Natalie is hurt; Caddy pushed her
down the ladder and ran off. Quentin asks her where it hurts and says that
he bets he can lift her up. [a skip in time] Natalie tells him that
something [probably kissing] is "like dancing sitting down" (135); Quentin
asks her how he should hold her to dance, placing his arms around her, and
she moans. Quentin looks up to see Caddy in the door watching them. Quentin
tells her that he and Natalie were just dancing sitting down; she ignores
him.
She and Natalie fight about the events that led to Natalie being pushed off
the ladder and whose fault it was; Caddy claims that she was "just brushing
the trash off the back of your dress" (136). Natalie leaves and Quentin
jumps into the mud of the pigpen, muddying himself up to his waist. Caddy
ignores him and stands with her back to him. He comes around in front of
her and tells her that he was just hugging Natalie. She turns her back and
continues to ignore him, saying she doesn't give a damn what he was doing.
Shouting "I'll make you give a damn," he smears mud on her dress as she
slaps him. They tumble, fighting, on the grass, then sit up and realize how
dirty they are. They head to the branch to wash the mud off themselves.
Caddy kisses a boy (1906): Quentin slaps Caddy and demands to know why she
let the boy kiss her. With the red print of his hand rising on her cheek,
she replies that she didn't let him, she made him. Quentin tells her that
it is not for kissing that he slapped her, but for kissing a "darn town
squirt" (134). He rubs her face in the grass until she says "calf rope."
She shouts that at least she didn't kiss a "dirty girl like Natalie anyway"
(134).
Caddy has sex with Dalton Ames, 1909: Caddy stands in the doorway, and
someone [Quentin?] asks her why she won't bring Dalton Ames into the house.
Mother replies that she "must do things for women's reasons" (92). Caddy
will not look at Quentin. Benjy bellows and pulls at her dress and she
shrinks against the wall, and he pushes her out of the room. Sitting on the
porch, Quentin hears her door slamming and Benjy still howling. She runs
out of the house and Quentin follows her; he finds her lying in the branch.
He threatens to tell Father that he committed incest with her; she replies
with pity. He tells her that he is stronger than she is, he will make her
tell him. He adds that he fooled her; all the time she thought it was her
boyfriends and it was Quentin instead. The smell of honeysuckle is all
around them.
She asks him if Benjy is still crying. He asks her if she loves Dalton
Ames; she places his hand on her chest and he feels her heart beating
there. He asks her if he made her do it, saying "Ill kill him I swear I
will father neednt know until afterward and then you and I nobody need ever
know we can take my school money we can cancel my matriculation Caddy you
hate him dont you" (151). She moves his hand to her throat, where the blood
is "hammering," and says "poor Quentin" (151). A moment later she says "yes
I hate him I would die for him Ive already died for him I die for him over
and over again" (151). She looks at him and then says "you've never done
that have you," to which Quentin responds "yes yes lots of times with lots
of girls," but he is lying, and Caddy knows it; he cries on her shirt and
they lie together in the branch (151). He holds a knife to her throat,
telling her that he can kill her quickly and painlessly and then kill
himself. She agrees and he asks her to close her eyes, but she doesn't,
looking past his head at the sky.
He begins to cry; he cannot do it. She holds his head to her breast and he
drops the knife. She stands up and tells him that she has to go, and
Quentin searches in the water for his knife. The two walk together past the
ditch where Nancy's bones were, then she turns and tells him to stop [she
is headed to meet Dalton Ames]. He replies that he is stronger than she is;
she tells him to go back to the house. But he continues to follow her. Just
past the fence, Dalton Ames is waiting for her, and she introduces them and
kisses Dalton.
Quentin tells them that he is going to take a walk in the woods, and she
asks him to wait for her at the branch, that she will be there soon. He
walks aimlessly, trying to escape the smell of honeysuckle that chokes him,
and lies on the bank of the branch. Presently Caddy appears and tells him
to go home. He shakes her; she is limp in his hands and does not look at
him. They walk together to the house, and at the steps he asks her again if
she loves Dalton Ames. She tells him that she doesn't know. She tells him
that she is "bad anyway you cant help it" (158).
Quentin fights with Dalton Ames, 1909: Quentin sees Dalton Ames go into a
barbershop in town and waits for him to come out. He tells him "Ive been
looking for you two or three days" and Dalton replies that he can't talk to
him there on the street; the two arrange to meet at the bridge over the
creek at one o'clock (158). Dalton is very polite to Quentin. Later, Caddy
overhears Quentin telling T. P. to saddle his horse and asks him where he
is going. He will not tell her and calls her a whore. He tells T. P. that
he won't need his horse after all and walks to the bridge. Dalton is
waiting for him there. Quentin tells him to leave town. Dalton stares at him and asks if Caddy sent him. Quentin tells him that
he, and only he, is asking Dalton to leave town. Dalton dismisses this,
just wishing to know if Caddy is all right. Quentin continues to order him
to leave, and Dalton counters with "what will you do if I dont leave"
(160). In response Dalton slowly and deliberately smokes a cigarette,
leaning on the bridge railing. He tells Quentin to stop taking it so hard,
that if he hadn't gotten Caddy pregnant some other guy would have. Shaking,
Quentin asks him if he ever had a sister, and he replies "no but theyre all
bitches" (160). Quentin hits him, but Dalton catches him by both wrists and
reaches under his coat for a gun, then turns him loose. Dropping a piece of bark into the creek, Dalton shoots at it and hands the
gun to Quentin. Quentin punches at him and he holds his wrists again, and
Quentin passes out. He asks Quentin how he feels and if he can make it home
all right. He tells him that he'd better not walk and offers him his horse.
Quentin brushes him off and eventually he rides off. Quentin slumps against
a tree. He hears hoofbeats and Caddy comes running. She thought that Dalton
shot him. She holds his face with her hands and Quentin grabs her wrists.
She begs him to let her go so she can run after Dalton, then suddenly stops
struggling. Quentin asks her if she loves him. Again she places his hand on
her throat, and tells him to say his name. Quentin says "Dalton Ames," and
each time he does he can feel the blood surging in her throat.
Quentin meets Herbert Head before Caddy's wedding, 1910: Herbert finds
Quentin alone in the parlor and attempts to get to know him better. He is
smoking a cigar and offers one to Quentin. Herbert tells him that Caddy
talked so much about him when they met that he thought she was talking
about a husband or boyfriend, not a brother. He asks Quentin about Harvard,
reminiscing about his own college days, and Quentin accuses him of cheating
[he has heard rumors about Herbert's cheating at cards]. Herbert jokingly
banters back that Quentin is "better than a play you must have made the
Dramat" (108).
He tells Quentin that he likes him and that he is glad they are going to be
friends. He offers to give him a hand and get him started in business, but
Quentin rejects his offer and challenges him. They begin to fight but stop
when Herbert sees that his cigar butt has almost burned a spot into the
mantel. He backs off and again offers Quentin his friendship and offers him
some money, which Quentin rejects. They are just beginning to fight again
when Caddy enters and asks Herbert to leave so she can talk to Quentin
alone. Alone, she asks Quentin what he is doing and warns him not to get
involved in her life again. He notices that she is feverish, and she tells
him that she is sick. He asks her what she means and she tells him she is
just sick and begs him not to tell anyone. Again he asks her what she means
and tells her that if she is sick she shouldn't go through with the
ceremony. She replies that she can and must and that "after that it'll be
all right it wont matter" and begs him to look after Benjy and make sure
that they don't send him to an asylum (112). Quentin promises.
Caddy's wedding, 1910: Benjy is howling outside, and Caddy runs out the
door to him, "right out of the mirror" (77).
Mother speaks, undated: Mother tells Father that she wants to go away and
take only Jason, because he is the only child who loves her, the only child
who is truly a Bascomb, not a Compson. She says that the other three
children are her "punishment for putting aside [her] pride and marrying a
man who held himself above [her]" (104). These three are "not [her] flesh
and blood" and she is actually afraid of them, that they are the symbols of
a curse upon her and the family. She views Caddy not merely as damaging the
family name with her promiscuity but actually "corrupting" the other
children (104).
Quentin's conversations with Father, undated (a string of separate
conversations on the same theme): Quentin tells his father that he
committed incest with Caddy; his father does not believe him. Father takes
a practical, logical, if unemotional view of Caddy's sexuality, telling
Quentin that women have "a practical fertility of suspicion . . . [and] an
affinity for evil," that he should not take her promiscuity to heart
because it was inevitable (96). When Quentin tells him that he would like
to have been born a eunuch so that he never had to think about sex, he
responds "it's because you are a virgin: dont you see? Women are never
virgins. Purity is a negative state and therefore contrary to nature. It's
nature is hurting you not Caddy."
Quentin replies "that's just words" and father counters "so is virginity"
(116). Quentin insists that he has committed incest with Caddy and that he
wants to die, but still Father won't believe him. Father tells him that he
is merely "blind to what is in yourself to that part of general truth the
sequence of natural events and their causes which shadows every mans brow
even benjys . . . you cannot bear to think that someday it will no longer
hurt you like this" (177). He claims that not even Caddy was really "quite
worth despair," that Quentin will grow out of the pain he feels at her
betrayal of his ideal (178).
Analysis of June Second, 1910:
From the very first sentence of the section, Quentin is obsessed with time;
words associated with time like "watch," "clock," "chime," and "hour" occur
on almost every page. When Quentin wakes he is "in time again, hearing the
watch," and the rest of the day represents an attempt to escape time, to
get "out of time" (76). His first action when he wakes is to break the
hands off his watch in an attempt to stop time, to escape the "reducto
absurdum of all human experience" which is the gradual progression toward
death (76). Perversely taking literally his father's statement that "time
is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the
clock stops does time come to life," he tears the hands off his watch, only
to find that it continues to tick even without the hands (85). Throughout
this section, Quentin tries to escape time in similar ways; he tries to
avoid looking at clocks, he tries to travel away from the sound of school
chimes or factory whistles. By the end of the section he has succeeded in
escaping knowledge of the time (when he returns to school he hears the bell
ringing and has no idea what hour it is chiming off), but he still has not
taken himself out of time. In the end, as he knows throughout this section,
the only way to escape time is to die.
Jean-Paul Sartre, in his analysis of this novel, sees Quentin's suicide as
not merely a way of escaping time but of exploding time. His suicide is
present in all the actions of the day, not so much a fate he could dream of
escaping as "an immobile wall, a thing which he approaches backward, and
which he neither wants to nor can conceive" (Sartre, 91). It is not a
future but a part of the present, the point from which the story is told.
Quentin narrates the day's events in the past tense, as if they have
already happened; the "present" from which he looks back at the day's
events must be the moment of his death. As Sartre puts it:
Since the hero's last thoughts coincide approximately with the bursting of
his memory and its annihilation, who is remembering? . . . . [Faulkner] has
chosen the infinitesimal instant of death. Thus when Quentin's memory
begins to unravel its recollections ("Through the wall I heard Shreve's bed-
springs and then his slippers on the floor hishing. I got up . . . ") he is
already dead (92).
In other words, time explodes at the instant of Quentin's suicide, and the
events of this "infinitesimal instant" are recorded in this section. By
killing himself, Quentin has found the only way to access time that is
"alive" in the sense that his father details, time that has escaped the
clicking of little wheels.
But why does Quentin want to escape time? The answer lies in one of the
conversations with his father that are recorded in this section. When
Quentin claims that he committed incest with Caddy, his father refuses to
believe him and says:
You cannot bear to think that someday it will no longer hurt you like this
. . . it is hard believing to think that a love or a sorrow is a bond
purchased without design and which matures willynilly and is recalled
without warning . . . no you will not do that until you come to believe
that even she was not quite worth despair perhaps (177-178).
Quentin's response to this statement is "i will never do that nobody knows
what i know." His attempt to stop the progression of time is an attempt to
preserve the rawness of the pain Caddy's promiscuity and marriage have
caused him; he never wants to think of her as "not quite worth despair."
Like Benjy, Quentin is obsessed with an absent Caddy, and both brothers'
sections are ordered around memories of her, specifically of her
promiscuity. For both brothers, her absence is linked to her promiscuity,
but for Quentin her promiscuity signals not merely her loss from his life
but also the loss of the romantically idealized idea of life he has built
for himself. This ideal life has at its center a valuation of purity and
cleanness and a rejection of sexuality; Quentin sees his own developing
sexuality as well as his sister's as sinful. The loss of her virginity is
the painful center of a spiral of loss as his illusions are shattered.
Critics have read Quentin's obsession with Caddy's virginity as an
antebellum-style preoccupation with family honor, but in fact family honor
is hardly ever mentioned in this section. The pain that Caddy's promiscuity
causes Quentin seems too raw, too intense, too visceral to be merely a
disappointment at the staining family honor. And perhaps most importantly,
Quentin's response to her promiscuity, namely telling his father that he
and she committed incest, is not the act of a person concerned with family
honor. Rather it is the act of a boy so in love with his sister and so
obsessed with maintaining the closeness of their relationship that he would
rather be condemned by the town and suffer in hell than let her go. He is,
in fact, obsessed with her purity and virginity, but not to maintain
appearances in the town; he wants her forever to remain the unstained,
saintly mother/sister he imagines her to be.
Quentin did not, of course, commit incest with Caddy. And yet the
encounters he remembers are fraught with sexual overtones. When Caddy walks
in on Quentin and Natalie kissing in the barn, for instance, Quentin throws
himself into the "stinking" mud of the pigpen. When this fails to get a
response from Caddy, he wipes mud on her:
You dont you dont I'll make you I'll make you give a damn. She hit my hands
away I smeared mud on her with the other hand I couldnt feel the wet
smacking of her hand I wiped mud from my legs smeared it on her wet hard
turning body hearing her fingers going into my face but I couldnt feel it
even when the rain began to taste sweet on my lips (137).
Echoing the mud-stained drawers that symbolize her later sexuality, Quentin
smears mud on Caddy's body in a heated exchange, feeling as he does so her
"wet hard turning body." The mud is both Quentin's penance for his sexual
experimentation with Natalie and the sign of sexuality between Quentin and
Caddy.
The scene in the branch of the river is similarly sexual in nature. Quentin
finds Caddy at the branch trying to wash away the guilt she finds; amid the
"suck[ing] and gurgl[ing]" waves of the water. When he asks her if she
loves Dalton Ames, she places his hand on her chest and he feels her heart
"thudding" (150). He smells honeysuckle "on her face and throat like paint
her blood pounded against my hand I was leaning on my other arm it began to
jerk and jump and I had to pant to get any air at all out of that thick
gray honeysuckle;" and he lies "crying against her damp blouse" (150). Taking out a knife, he holds it against her throat and tells her "it wont
take but a second Ill try not to hurt." She replies "no like this you have
to push it harder," and he says "touch your hand to it" (151). In this
scene we have the repetitive surging both of the water and of Caddy's blood
beneath Quentin's hand. We have the two siblings lying on top of one
another at the edge of this surging water, the pungent smell of honeysuckle
(which Quentin associates with sex throughout the section) so thick around
them that Quentin has trouble breathing. We have a knife (a common phallic
symbol) which Quentin proposes to push into Caddy's blood-flushed neck,
promising he will "try not to hurt." Overall, the scene overflows with
sexual metaphors; if the two do not actually commit incest, they certainly
do share a number of emotionally powerful, sexually loaded moments.
Quentin's wish to have committed incest is not a desire to have sex with
Caddy; that would shatter his ideals of purity even more than her
encounters with Dalton Ames. Nor is it, as we have determined, a way to
preserve the family honor. Instead, it seems to be a way to keep Caddy to
himself forever: "if it could just be a hell beyond that: the clean flame
the two of us more than dead. Then you will have only me then only me then
the two of us amid the pointing and the horror beyond the clean flame"
(116). Separated from the rest of the world by the "clean" purifying flames
of hell, Quentin and Caddy could be alone together, forever burning away
the sin of her sexuality. He would rather implicate himself in something as
horrible as incest than leave Caddy to her promiscuity or lose her through
her marriage to Herbert Head.
If time-words are the most frequently occurring words in this section, the
second most frequent is the word "shadow." Throughout his journeys, Quentin
is just as obsessed with his shadow as he is with time. For example, he
walks on his shadow as he wanders through Cambridge: "trampling my shadow's
bones . . . . I walked upon the belly of my shadow" (96). When asked what
the significance of shadows was in this section, Faulkner replied "that
shadow that stayed on his mind so much was foreknowledge of his own death,
that he was - Death is here, shall I step into it or shall I step away from
it a little longer? I won't escape it, but shall I accept it now or shall I
put it off until next Friday" (Minter, qtd. in Martin, 6). This explanation
certainly seems to fit some of Quentin's thoughts; for example, at one
point, he imagines drowning his shadow in the water of the river, just as
he will later drown himself: "my shadow leaning flat upon the water, so
easily had I tricked it . . . . if I only had something to blot it into the
water, holding it until it was drowned, the shadow of the package like two
shoes wrapped up lying on the water.
Niggers say a drowned man's shadow was watching for him in the water all
the time" (90). Here Quentin imagines his drowned shadow beckoning him from
the river, drowned before him and waiting for him to follow suit.
Like his shadow mirroring his motions and emotions, certain aspects of his
day's travels mirror his life and the troubled state of his mind. Most
obvious among these is his encounter with the Italian girl he calls
"sister" and the reaction of her brother Julio. Calling this little girl
"little sister" or "sister" ironically recalls Caddy, whom Quentin at one
point calls "Little Sister Death." But whereas his suicidal mission is
caused by the fact that he cannot hold on to Caddy, here he cannot get rid
of this "little sister," who follows him around the town and will not leave
him. Then when Julio finds them, he accuses Quentin stealing her, just as
Quentin feels Dalton Ames and Herbert Head have stolen Caddy from him.
Julio is not the only character to mirror Quentin, though. As Edmond Volpe
points out, Dalton Ames himself is a foil for Quentin, the embodiment of
the romantic ideal he has cast for himself:
Quentin's meeting with Dalton is a disaster. His conception of himself in
the traditional role of protector of women collapses, not only because he
fails to accomplish his purpose [of beating Dalton up] but because he is
forced to recognize his own weakness. Dalton is actually a reflection of
Quentin's vision of himself: calm, courageous, strong, kind. The real
Quentin does not measure up to the ideal Quentin, just as reality does not
measure up to Quentin's romantic vision of what life should be (113).
Quentin is in actuality the "obverse reflection" of himself, a man who does
not live up to his own ideals, who fails to protect his sister from a
villain who turns out to be as chivalrous and Quentin is weak.
Thus at the "infinitesimal instant" of his death, Quentin is a man whose
disillusionment with his shattered ideals consumes him. His death, one of
the "signs" Roskus sees of the bad luck of the Compson family, is one step
in the gradual dissolution of the family, a degeneration that will pick up
speed in the sections to come.
Summary of April Sixth, 1928:
Beginning with the statement "once a bitch always a bitch," this section
reads as if Jason is telling the reader the story of his day; it is more
chronological and less choppy than Quentin's or Benjy's sections, but still
unconventional in tone. Jason and his mother in her room waiting for
Quentin to finish putting on her makeup and go down to breakfast. Mother is
concerned that Quentin often skips school and asks Jason to take care of
it. Both Jason and his mother are manipulative and passive-aggressive,
mother complaining about the ailments she suffers and the way her children
betrayed her, Jason countering with statements like "I never had time to go
to Harvard or drink myself into the ground. I had to work. But of course if
you want me to follow her around and see what she does, I can quit the
store and get a job where I can work at night" (181). Jason goes down to
the kitchen, where Quentin is begging Dilsey for another cup of coffee.
Dilsey tells her she will be late for school, and Jason says he will fix
that, grabbing her by the arm.
Her bathrobe comes unfastened and she pulls it closed around her. He begins
to take off his belt, but Dilsey stops him from hitting her. Mother comes
in, and Jason puts down the belt. Quentin runs out of the house. In the car
on the way to town, Quentin and Jason fight about who paid for her
schoolbooks - Caddy or Jason. Jason claims that Mother has been burning all
of the checks Caddy sends. Quentin tells Jason that she would tear off any
dress that he paid for and grabs the neck of her dress as if she will tear
it. Jason has to stop the car and grab her wrists to stop her. He tells her
that she is a slut and a bad girl, and she replies that she would rather be
in hell than in his house. He drops her off at school and drives on to his
job at the farm goods store.
At the store, old Job, a black worker, is unloading cultivators, and Jason
accuses of him of doing it as slowly as he possibly can. He has mail; he
opens a letter with a check from Caddy. The letter asks if Quentin is sick
and states that she knows that Jason reads all her letters. He goes out to
the front of the store and engages in a conversation with a farmer about
the cotton crop. He tells him that cotton is a "speculator's crop" that "a
bunch of damn eastern jews" get farmers to grow so that they can control
the stock market (191). He goes to the telegraph office, where a stock
report has just come in (Jason has invested in the cotton crop) - the
cotton stock is up four points. He tells the telegraph operator to send a
collect message to Caddy saying "Q writing today" (193).
He goes back to the store and sits at his desk, reading a letter from his
girlfriend Lorraine, who is basically a prostitute he keeps in Memphis. She
calls Jason her "daddy." He burns her letter, commenting "I make it a rule
never to keep a scrap of paper bearing a woman's hand, and I never write
them at all" (193). Then he takes out Caddy's letter to Quentin, but before
he can open it some business interrupts him. He recalls the day of his
father's funeral; he remembers saying that Quentin wasted his chance at
Harvard, learning only "how to go for a swim at night without knowing how
to swim," Benjy is nothing but a "gelding" that should be rented out as a
circus sideshow, Father was a drunk who should have had a "one-armed strait
jacket," and Caddy is a whore (196-197).
Uncle Maury patted Mother's arm with expensive black gloves at the funeral,
and Jason noted that the flowers on the grave must have cost fifty dollars.
He also remembers the day that Father brought baby Quentin home; Mother
would not let her sleep in Caddy's old room, afraid she will be
contaminated by the atmosphere in there. She also declares that nobody in
the house must ever say Caddy's name again. On the day of the funeral,
Caddy appeared in the cemetery and begged Jason to let her see the baby for
just one minute, and she would pay him fifty dollars; later she changes
this to one hundred dollars. Jason smugly remembers how he took the baby in
a carriage and held her up to the window as he drove past Caddy; this
fulfilled his agreement to the letter. Later she showed up in the kitchen,
accusing him of backing out of their agreement. He threatened her and told
her to leave town immediately. She made him promise to treat Quentin well
and to give her the money that she sends for her.
Jason's boss, Earl, comes up to the front of the store and tells Jason he
is going out for a snack because they won't have time to go home for lunch;
a show is in town and there will be too much business. Jason finally opens
Caddy's letter to Quentin, and inside is a money order for fifty dollars,
not a check. He looks around in the office for a blank check; every month
he takes a fake check home to mother to burn and cashes the real check. But
the blank checks are all gone. Quentin comes in and asks if a letter has
come for her. He taunts her, then finally gives her the letter, without the
money in it. She reaches out for the money order, but he will not give it
to her. He tells her she has to sign it without looking at it. She asks how
much it is for, and he tells her it is for ten dollars. She says he is
lying, but he will not give it to her until she agrees to take ten dollars
for it. She takes the money and leaves, upset.
Earl returns and again tells Jason not to go home to lunch; Jason agrees
and leaves. First he goes to a print shop to get a blank check. The print
shop doesn't have any, and finally Jason finds a checkbook that was a prop
at an old theater. He goes back to the store and puts the check in the
letter, gluing the envelope back to look unopened. As he leaves again, Earl
tells him not to take too much time. He goes to the telegraph office and
checks up on the stock market, then goes home for lunch. He goes up to
Mother's room and gives her the doctored letter. Instead of burning it
right away she looks at it for a while. She notices that it is drawn on a
different bank than the others have been, but then burns it. Dilsey is not
ready with lunch yet because she is waiting for Quentin to come home;
finally she puts it on the table and they eat. Jason hands Mother a letter
from Uncle Maury; it is a letter asking her to lend him some money for an
investment he would like to make.
Jason takes Mother's bankbook with him and returns to town. He goes to the
bank and deposits the money from Caddy and his paycheck, then returns to
the telegraph office for an update; the stock is down thirteen points. He
goes back to the store, where Earl asks him if he went home to dinner.
Jason tells him that he had to go to the dentist's. A while later he hears
the band from the show start playing. He argues with Job about spending
money to go to a show like that. Suddenly he sees Quentin in an alley with
a stranger with a red bow tie. It is still 45 minutes before school should
let out. He follows them up the street, but they disappear. A boy comes up
and gives Jason a telegram: the market day closed with cotton stocks down.
He goes back to the store and tells Earl that he has to go out for a while.
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