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.
He gets in his car and goes home. Gasoline gives him headaches, and he
thinks about having to bring some camphor with him when he goes back to the
store. He goes into his room and hides the money from Caddy in a strongbox
in his room. Mother tells him to take some aspirin, but he doesn't. He gets
back in his car and is almost to town when he passes a Ford driven by a man
with a red bow tie. He looks closer and sees Quentin inside. He chases the
Ford through the countryside, his headache growing by the second. Finally
he sees the Ford parked near a field and gets out to look for them; he is
sure they are hiding in the bushes somewhere having sex. The sun slants
directly into his eyes, and his headache is pounding so hard he can't think
straight. He reaches the place where he thinks they are, then hears a car
start up behind him and drive off, the horn honking. He returns to his own
car and sees that they have let the air out of one of his tires. He has to
walk to the nearest farm to borrow a pump to blow it back up.
He returns to town, stopping in a drugstore to get a shot for his headache
and the telegraph office; he has lost $200 on the stock market. Then he
goes back to the store. A telegram has arrived from his stockbroker,
advising him to sell. Instead he writes back to the broker, telling him he
will buy. The store closes, and he drives home to the sounds of the band
playing. At home, Quentin and Mother are fighting upstairs, and Luster asks
him for a quarter to go to the show. Jason replies that he has two tickets
already that he won't be using. Luster begs him for one, but he tells him
he will only sell it to him for a nickel. Luster replies that he has no
money, and Jason burns the tickets in the fireplace. Dilsey puts supper on
the table for him and tells him that Quentin and Mother won't be coming to
dinner.
Jason insists that they come unless they are actually sick. They come
down. At dinner, he offers Quentin an extra piece of meat and tells her and
Mother that he lent his car to a stranger who needed to chase around one of
his relatives who was running around with a town woman. Quentin looks
guilty. Finally she stands up and says that if she is bad, it is only
because Jason made her bad. She runs off and slams the door. Mother
comments that she got all of Caddy's bad traits and all of Quentin's too;
Jason takes this to mean that Mother thinks Quentin is the child of Caddy
and her brother's incestuous relationship. They finish dinner, and Mother
locks Quentin into her room for the night. Jason retires to his room for
the night, still ruminating on the "dam New York jew" that is taking all of
his money (263).
Analysis of April Sixth, 1928:
Jason's section appears more readable and more conventional; its style,
while still stream-of-consciousness, is more chronological in progression,
with very few jumps in time. It reads more like a monologue than a string
of loosely connected events, like Benjy's and Quentin's sections were.
Critics have claimed that the book progresses from chaos to order, from
timelessness to chronology, from pure sensation to logical order, and from
interiority to exteriority as it travels from Benjy's world of bright
shapes and confused time through Jason's rigorously ordered universe to the
third-person narrative of the fourth section. This third section represents
a shift into the public world from the anguished interiority of Benjy and
Quentin, and a shift into "normal" novelistic narrative as Jason recounts
the story of the events of the day.
The first sentence of each section reveals a lot about the tone and themes
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