An interesting aspect of the second portion of the novel, Quentin’s memory, is finding out that Quentin is going to commit suicide. Faulkner provides us with many clues in Quentin’s section that foreshadow Quentin’s suicide. His weird obsession with time is one thing. He’s always thinking about the ticking noise. He is obviously agitated; he breaks his watch with his fist and then goes to the watch store but doesn’t get it fixed. I think that he had the whole event planned out in his head—a specific time for when he was going to drown himself. While he is at the watch store, he sees all of the clocks and asks the man if one of the times was correct and when the man begins to tell him the time, Quentin stops him. I think that he is having an internal struggle—he wants to end his life but at the same time is a little scared and doesn’t want to face the fact that it’s getting closer and closer to the end. Another clue is the two letters that he writes—one to his father and one to his roommate Shreve. While Quentin is in town, he meets a man named Deacon and gives him the letter for Shreve and tells him that he has something for him but he can’t go and get it until the next day. At the beginning of the section Quentin puts out two dress suits and then packs up his stuff into a trunk and puts the key into the letter and seals it. One other major clue is when he buys the two weights and says that they were small enough to look like he was carrying a pair of shoes—meaning they wouldn’t bring unnecessary attention to him. He has a lot of dark memories on his mind. For example, the incest situation is brought up. There is the part about Dalton Ames and Quentin saying that it wasn’t Ames, it was him (Quentin). Quentin is obviously dealing with a lot.
The obvious question now, at the point of the book where I’m at, is why does Quentin want to commit suicide? Right now the first thing that comes to mind is the incest situation involving Caddy, which still remains to be a little unclear as to what really happened. The name Dalton Ames is continuously being brought up as well as dialogues from Caddy’s wedding. One possible explanation might be that he can’t face the fact that he might have done something really bad with Caddy. In some of the scenes regarding Caddy’s wedding, Quentin is shown trying to discourage her from marrying Herbert. There could be an underlying reason as to why Quentin didn’t want her to marry Herbert, besides the incest. Maybe he knew something bad about Herbert. This novel is kind of like a mystery novel, in that we are left with so many loose ends and it is our job to try and connect the clues and figure out what happens. (508)
1 comment:
Sue--I agree with your sense of Quentin's deliberateness and the notion that he is proceeding according to a preconceived plan. You don't say exactly where you are in the reading, but there's a line near the end of the section where he listens to the bells and thinks, "fifteen minutes and I'll not be." I think there are clues in both his remembered conversations with Caddy and with Father to help us understand why.
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