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
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