Boomdaddy is back! Just read the Quentin chapter in The Sound and the Fury and it was just as difficult to read as the Benjy chapter, if not more difficult. Faulkner pulled a fast one on us and decided to change narrators. And if you thought it would be harder to understand a mentally challenged narrator, you would be mistaken. A suicidal narrator is actually just as difficult. Although, the second perspective does shed more light on the Compson family.

Quentin is much more educated than Benjy, I mean he is attending Harvard, so he provides better syntax in his narration. But his storytelling is all over the place. His stream-of-consciousness style is quite hard to follow and he uses the flashback literary device similar to Benjy but refers back to the same ideas. This style threw me off a little just as the Benjy chapter did. He recalls all these memories,

The narration suggests a lot about Quentin’s mental state. He seems quite scattered and unsure of himself all the time. Everything he tries to do fails. He tries to protect Caddy from bad men and even tells his father he had incest with her. But everything he tries to do doesn’t have any success. As the chapter progresses, he seems more and more suicidal, and as it was spoiled for me by my very own teacher, Mrs. Oles, Quentin does eventually commit suicide. However, it is quite apparent in the chapter without the spoilers. He stares off a bridge into the water, sees his shadow, and wishes he could find a way to drown it. If that isn’t evidence enough that he does not want to live anymore, I don’t know what is.

On to the next chapter for Boomdaddy. Wish me luck!