41304 (The Sound and the Fury), страница 4

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.