Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury

Quentin senses the lofty shadow that his ancestors cast on him, recognizing the present as an even more pathetic version of the past. Faulkner uses shadows to open Quentin’s meditation of time as a critical and destructive agent in his life. From the onset of his day, his ability to decipher time using the location of shadows indicates his extreme fixation on time. To Quentin, his mornings serve as a rude awakening of his obsessions and insecurities. He describes that the “shadow of the sash” that “appeared on the curtains” allowed him to recognize the time of day and made him “in time again” (50).

As Quentin spends much of the narrative seeking ways to escape time, he presents waking up “in time again” as a burden that he uses sleep to escape from (50).

Furthermore, his actions throughout the day mostly function as a way to abandon the shadow and the creeping nature of time. From the onset, Faulkner establishes shadows as the carrier of a reminder of the passage of time.

Quentin watches the shadows gradually inundate all areas of happines, casting larger dark spots as the day goes on. Consequently, the darkening nature of shadows demonstrates the blanket that the passage of time creates over the Compson family name.

Quentin’s sensitivity to shadows suggests his acute awareness of the passage of time and the slow disposal of the Compson name. Faulkner’s poetic personification of the shadow demonstrates Quentin’s extreme familiarity with it. Quentin lingers on the shadow in his bedroom as a haunting reminder.

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He laments that the “shadow of the sash was still there,” so he “had to turn [his] back to it” (51). Through the explicative clause, “”so I had to turn my back to it,” Faulkner conveys Quentin’s desire to rationalize his actions to himself (51). His inability to focus with the shadow around him relates to his obsession with time. He cannot fall asleep in a sane state knowing that his shadow creeps closer to him with the passage of time.

Quentin takes a passive course of action, coping with his inability to change the past by ignoring time and physically turning away from it. Faulkner expresses his fixation on time as an obsession, noting his ability to tell time “almost to the minute” through the location of his shadow on the curtains (51). Because Faulkner links the imagery of shadows and time, he expresses the origin of Quentin’s desire to stop time. Because the darkening of familial values and deflowering of innocence accompanies the passage of time, he wishes to either go back in time to reverse this darkening or end his life as a permanent method of turning his back to the shadow.

Quentin links his deep regret towards Caddy’s wedding day, using shadows to criticize her marriage and express his jealousy. On Caddy’s wedding day, Quentin personifies her veil as “the floating shadow of the veil running across the grass” (54). By describing Caddy as a shadow he emits Caddy’s sense of regret for her impure lifestyle and unethical marriage. Unlike Quentin, rather than running away from her shadow, Caddy turns into the shadow. His representation of Caddy as a shadow demonstrates the permanence of her transformation due to the loss of her virginity and her soiling of the family name.

Quentin’s opinion that the shadow of his ancestors imposes a large, unfollowed burden on his lifestyle extends to the rest of his siblings. While the mother views her marriage to Mr. Compson as illegitimate, Quentin deems that Caddy’s marriage as ignobler. Faulkner indicates that Quentin’s depression may result from his extreme bias, exaggerating his regrets due to jealousy of Dalton Ames and Herbert Head.

Quentin relates his thoughts of suicide to the moral decline of his family and speculates on the success of suicide indirectly. Through dark, blunt references to suicide, Faulkner ominously sets the stage for Quentin’s death. He notes, “Niggers say a drowned man’s shadow was watching for him in the water all the time” (58). Imagining his drowned shadow beckoning him from the river and waiting for him to follow suit, he grows in his convictions. From the onset of his narrative, Quentin describes the haunting and encapsulating nature of his shadow, relating it to his decline. His shadow, constantly stalking him, demonstrates the complete breakdown of his individuality.Rather than actively casting his shadow, he will eventually take after his shadow and kill himself, rendering his shadow nonexistent and ending his pain.

“Trampling my shadow’s bones into the concrete with hard heels” Throughout the day, Quentin grows in his antipathy towards his past, expressed through his actions against his shadow. Aggressively and repeatedly “trampling [his] shadow’s bones into the concrete with hard heels,” Quentin discernibly seeks to destroy his lurking memories (70). The shadow, a reminder of the passage of time, carries the burdens that Caddy, her marriage, and her loss of virginity impose on him. His aggression towards his shadow mostly represents displaced anger that he feels towards Caddy His despisal of his shadow represents his anger that the Compson family values falter with time, dirtied by Caddy’s sins.

In order to relay the blame, he displaces his anger for failing to stop Caddy’s marriage as anger at time and his own shadow. Faulkner implies Quentin’s suicide results from his inability to persist with memories of his past. Quentin will always fear the inundating amount of regret he carries that Caddy’s impurity and marriage impose on him.

Quentin describes death as a companion, mirroring and continuously judging his actions. He exchanges the idea of a continuous darkness mocking him with the idea that dark and light coexist. Along with Quentin, a sparrow listens to the chimes of the clock with “round and bright” eyes, “cocking his head at Quentin” (61). Throughout the day his clear pondering thoughts of suicide mostly relate to the entrapment that the passage of time causes him. Here, Faulkner turns this idea around by linking Quentin’s suicide to a sparrow, a bird that symbolizes both death and freedom, alluding to the idea that ending a life can liberate one from the burden of enormous regret and cynicism.

The sparrow listens with him as the chimes strike, leading to the idea that death also keeps a close eye on time. This links Quentin with death because his actions parallel the sparrow. The brightness of the sparrows eyes hint to a release into heaven and being freed from the captivating life he lives. While the image of a sparrow is mostly associated with death, he personifies the eyes as “bright and round” offering insight into his view of life itself.

Faulkner extends his use of shadows by comparing Quentin’s past and present. In his encounter with the Italian girl that he calls “sister” and her brother Julio’s responds, Faulkner parallels the event to his relationship with Caddy (83). Calling this little girl “sister,” Quentin ironically recalls Caddy, whom Quentin once called “Little Sister Death.” Just as his inability to let go of Caddy results in his suicide, his inability to rid of this “little sister” leads to Julio hurting him, revealing the painfulness of holding onto the past. When Julio accuses Quentin of stealing the little girl, Faulkner draws a parallel to Quentin’s fear that Dalton Ames and Herbert Head have stolen Caddy from him. Just as a shadow parallels, distorts, and blurs the original truth, Quentin notices history repeating itself in worse ways.

After the death of Damuddy, Faulkner simulates the death of generation values, mocked by Caddy and destroyed by her daughter Quentin. Feeling that he betrayed his ancestors and ruined his present through his past, Quentin’s inability to bear shadows as reminders of his own deficiencies creates an ominous environment nurturing of his suicide.