Quentin Compson: Incest, Shakespeare, AND MORE!

Okie dokie, let’s chat about Quentin Compson, shall we? Honestly, he’s probably the most relatable character in the story so far, even though he is technically less mentally capable than his brother because *SPOILER ALERT* he eventually kills himself. His section is retold the day after his death, as he recounts the events that lead to him jumping off of a bridge. Well, it’s pretty obvious to the reader that his life was no walk in the park, right? So let’s list some problems that Quentin clearly has!

1. He’s extremely neurotic and obsessive-compulsive. He is extremely obsessed over his own self-image, along with the image of his family, and especially the image of his sister, Caddy. (AND SO SHE APPEARS AGAIN! Get used to it. We’re going to be talking about her a LOT in this blog post.)
2. He’s got some serious Mommy and Daddy issues that skip hand-in-hand with his OCD and neurotic tendencies.
3. My personal favorite, the big question mark on Quentin’s sexuality!

So, Quentin’s supposed to be the Golden-Boy of the Compson family. He’s a Harvard student that they weigh everything upon, which agonizes him and only increases his neurotic tendencies, especially when he begins to live in the past, instead of focusing on his presence. This stems from his Dad’s weird phobia of time--he believes that you cannot really escape time. When he tells Quentin this, naturally, the man considers it to be a challenge that he has to accept. Ironically enough, Quentin is eventually stuck in time, since this entire chapter is told ten years before the present, showing that even through death, Quentin could not really escape it.

While living most of his life in the past, he becomes increasingly worried about how women in the world are being treated. While living in a small home without many women, he came to understand his sexual identity through his sister. Quentin feels as though every person is technically someone else’s sister, and found himself constantly defending the honor of women, and getting beaten because of it multiple times.

Another thing that worries Quentin is his masculinity. He constantly wants to be more like his father, but his brother, Jason is always getting the better end of the bargain. This is established by the fact that Jason is also Mr. Compson’s name, and so they share the same amount of masculinity. Meanwhile, Caddy names her daughter after Quentin, which displays a pretty effeminate depiction of Quentin as a character. However, Quentin does have an excessive adoration for Caddy, which would portray the name of her daughter in a positive light, in regards to her brother.

When Mr. Compson finally finds out about Caddy’s pregnancy, Quentin tries to defend her, saying that they committed incest and that the child was his, in hopes that she could remain happy with her beau, Dalton. This of course, doesn’t really work out, considering that Quentin is most definitely a virgin.

But he does spend a loooot of time thinking about Caddy.

In fact, he is completely repulsed by the loss of her innocence because of his obsession with her image. He feels like he needs to constantly protect her, because without his protection, she would lose herself entirely. Of course, being the adorable lil spitfire Caddy is, she wouldn’t deal with any kind of crap from Quentin, no-sir-ee. Unfortunately for Quentin, that just drove him closer to the edge of insanity. Eventually, he realized that time is what corrupted people, and that the only way for him to escape time was to kill himself. And so, that’s exactly what he did.

The title of  The Sound and The Fury comes from a line in MacBeth by William Shakespeare, but I personally affiliate Quentin with Hamlet. If you’ve been living under a rock for your entire life, let me explain that Hamlet was insanely worried about self image, the sexual affairs of his mother, and time itself. That seems to be pretty similar to Quentin’s situation, right? Hamlet is arguably Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy, and I can’t help but see similarities in both of the characters. Although I’d like to write a more in depth essay on this subject, you can find more info here:

https://archive.org/stream/QuentinCompsonAndHamletAStudy/QuentinCompsonAndHamlet_djvu.txt

The most prominent question that arises in this chapter, however, has to do with Quentin’s sexuality. Does he really have sexual feelings towards Caddy? Personally, I think that Quentin is a homosexual. Although Faulkner never openly touched on the subject, Quentin’s sexual vulnerability seems to stem from something deeper than a strange respect for his sister. He is constantly worried about displaying his masculinity and about his self image--could it be that he’s trying to hide something? Sure, it could be incest. But when he has such a close relationship with his roommate, Shreve, that seems pretty unlikely. I’d like to do a more in depth essay on this as well, since there’s a lot more information I’d like to find before explaining this further.

Personally, I think Quentin might be the most interesting character in the novel. His stream of consciousness is enthralling, along with his weirdly relatable obsessions. I would really like to do more research on this character as I can find more. But until then? Let’s start reading about Jason. Great.