American Literature books summary

American Literature books summary

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.

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

of that particular part; this is especially true with Quentin's and Jason's

section. In Quentin's section, the first sentence draws the reader into his

obsession with being caught "in time" and includes two of the most common

symbols in the section: time and shadows. Jason's section begins "once a

bitch always a bitch, what I say," introducing both Jason's irrational

anger not only toward his sister and her daughter, but toward the world in

general, and also the rigorous logic that runs through this section (180).

Jason's world is dominated by logic. Once a bitch, always a bitch; like

mother, like daughter. Caddy was a whore, so is her daughter. He is furious

at Caddy for ruining his chances at getting a job, and the way she ruined

his chances was to bear an illegitimate daughter; therefore the way he will

get revenge on her and simultaneously recoup the money he lost is through

this same daughter. Caddy should have gotten him a job, but instead she had

Quentin; therefore it is his right to embezzle the money she sends to

Quentin in order to make up for the money he lost when he lost the job.

Jason's logic takes the form of literalism. Caddy is responsible for

getting him money, no matter where it comes from. She sends money each

month for Quentin's upkeep; he keeps Quentin clothed, housed and fed, so

the money should go to him. He himself claims that he "make[s] it a rule

never to keep a scrap of paper bearing a woman's hand," and yet he keeps

the money from the checks Caddy sends him; this act fits into his system of

logic because he cashes the checks, literally getting rid of her

handwriting while keeping the money. He allows his mother to literally burn

the checks she sends, but only after he has cashed them in secret. When

Caddy gives him 100 dollars to "see [Quentin] a minute" he grants her

request to the letter, holding the baby up to the carriage window as he

drives by, literally allowing Caddy only a minute's glimpse (203-205). When

Luster can't pay him a nickel for tickets to the show, he burns the tickets

rather than give then to him (255). All of these acts fit into a rigid and

literally defined logical order with which Jason structures his life.

Some readers see Jason's logic as a sign that he is more "sane" than the

rest of his family. He is not retarded like Benjy or irrationally

distraught like Quentin. He is able to live his life in a relatively normal

way, with a logical order to both his narrative and his daily activities.

However, Jason is just as blind, just as divorced from reality as his

brothers. Like them, he tries to control his life through a strictly

defined order, and when this is disrupted he collapses into irrationality.

Benjy's system of order is the routine of everyday life, disrupted on a

grand scale when Caddy leaves and on a small scale when Luster turns the

horses the wrong way or changes the arrangement of his "graveyard."

Quentin's system of order is the honor and purity he saw in himself and

Caddy when they were young, disrupted when Caddy loses her virginity and

leaves him. Jason's system of order is the rigidity of his logic, most of

which has to do with money, and with this he tries to control the world

around him. This system is disrupted when he loses his job opportunity

(Quentin gets a career boost in going to Harvard, so should Jason get a

career boost from Herbert Head), and again when Quentin refuses to come to

dinner, skips school, or runs away with his money. For each brother, the

systems he has established help to control everyday life, and the way they

do so is by controlling Caddy. As long as she is motherly to Benjy,

virginal to Quentin, and profftable to Jason, their worlds are in order.

But these controlling mechanisms are inflexible, breaking down entirely as

soon as Caddy or her daughter defies them.

Each brother remains irrationally connected with the past, particularly

with memories of Caddy. Benjy relives his memories of Caddy all the time,

making no distinction between the present and the past. Quentin goes

through the routines of life washed in a sea of memories of Caddy. And

Jason, for all he seems to have cut himself off from her entirely by

refusing to mention her name, is perhaps the closest of all to her. Not

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