/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.20838677]

i kind of got lost near the end of quentin's chapter (when he's going through the country), and started getting it again when he's preparing his suicide, can someone breakdown that section for me, plz?

[Anonymous No.20838792]

>>20838677
Why is my reading comprehension so bad? I don't remember anything about someone preparing a suicide. I want to read smart books for smart people, but I am too stupid to understand them. Fuck me. :-(

[Anonymous No.20838804]

Faulkner would just tell you to read it again and that's probably the best idea.

[Anonymous No.20838836]

>>20838792
It's okang anon. Did you take notes on it? If you didn't take notes on it then why would you expect to remember details?

[Anonymous No.20839915]

>>20838677
BLACKED: the cover

[Anonymous No.20840080]

>>20838677
It was the Call of the Crocodile of its time

[Anonymous No.20841479]

>>20840080
Kill your self, shill. You’ve done nothing but shat up /lit/.

[Anonymous No.20841699]

>>20838677
To me Quentin's conception of time was blurring because of guilt for what he had done. So Quentin is like Benjy in that he is experiencing incomprehension (Sound), but he is also experiencing despair (Fury) because he knows what he has lost. The incomprehension hides his motivations a bit and for some time I thought he really didn't want the little Italian kid but then she appeared next to him again. Part of those memories I suppose is remembering how jealous he was for his sister that he got in a fight, and also how even when he was surrounded by his college friends he was deeply engrossed in guilt.
Jason on the other hand reacted to all of this not with sadness, but with anger so he was all fury.

[Anonymouṡ No.20841945]

>>20838677
First of all, you need a decent edition. If you're reading it pirated as a pdf or something, the formating / italicization might be messed up, and that will make it impossible. My pages numbers etc refer to the Vintage Classics edition (see picture).

Faulkner originally wanted different coloured ink for different time periods. That would have made things a lot clearer, and shows he really wasn't trying to confuse people. But it would have been too expensive. He therefore compromised with italics. But it's not just "normal font = current time period; italics = flashback", for several reasons:

— Some flashbacks are really long, and having pages and pages in italics would be annoying as hell. (He does this in 'Absalom, Absalom!' and it's annoying as hell.)
— Some flashbacks have other flashbacks inside them.
— Sometimes (especially towards the end of Chapter 2) he wants confusion/ambiguity.

Italics signify a time jump, but work in two different ways, as far as I can see:

A) If the new time-period goes on for more than about a dozen lines, Faulkner puts just the first bit in italics then goes back into normal font *but stays in the new time period*. First example: page 2 ["Caddy uncaught me ... You don't want your hands froze on Christmas, do you."]. Here, the return to normal font ["'It's too cold out there..."] doesn't mean we're back into the present. We're still in the past. (There might be a small jump, like minutes, but it's the same basic memory.)

Notice it's something in the present that triggers a memory of a similar thing happening in the past. Benjy (in 1928) tries to crawl through the fence and catches himself on the nail, and has a flashback to crawling through the fence with Caddy 25-30 years earlier and catching himself on the nail in exactly the same way. Similarly, when he has dinner he remembers eating dinner in the past; when he goes to bed he remembers going to bed in the past, etc. This is how almost all the flashbacks work in the book.

B) If the jump is just a short digression, it *does* end when the italics end. First example: page 4 ["What are you moaning about ... into the lot"]. Pages 3-6 are all one big flashback, so normal font = the past. The italics are a little interjection from the present when Luster says something; when they end, Benjy slips back into his memories & carries on where he left off.

Sometimes the jump from present-to-past (or past-to-present) happens mid-action & hence mid-sentence. e.g. Page 15: I hushed and got in the water [normal font, 1928] and Roskus came and said to come to supper... [italics, 1900 or so].

[Anonymouṡ No.20842057]

>>20841945
Chapter 1 lays down the ground rules. Chapter 2 basically sticks to them, but with a couple of additional complexities:

— Quentin is much more self-aware than Benjy. Benjy operates at a very simple animal level of direct sensations. It doesn't matter to him whether he's experiencing something "real" in 1928, or re-living something from 1900. To him, it's all real; there are no additional layers of perception. With Quentin, there are. He can be recalling something intellectually, turning it over in his mind, or he can be overwhelmed by his memories so he's re-living the past, much as Benjy does. In other words he can be aware of his surroundings or not.

Consider e.g. the paragraph on page 75 (near the beginning of Chapter 2) beginning "If it had been cloudy..." and ending "Give Jason a year at Harvard." The little bit in italics is where Quentin is overwhelmed by memory. Then he gets control of himself, although he's still remembering. "I said I have committed incest...". Then he comes out of remembering and goes into thinking. "Let Jason have a year at Harvard." Faulkner could have let the italics run all the way up to "Cunning and serene". He didn't because it's a different vibe.


— Quentin gets so caught up in his memories that the memories run on and we miss important events going on "in real life". He also gets confused as to whether something is happening in real life or in his memory.

e.g. Consider the big flashback where he tries to protect his sister's honour (haha) and meets Dalton Ames on the bridge (page 159):

listen no good taking it so hard its not your fault kid it would have been some other fellow
did you ever have a sister did you
no but theyre all bitches
I hit him my open hand beat the impulse to shut it to his face...

Later we find he's been having a fight (i.e. losing a fight, as always) with another undergraduate, called Gerald, in the present, at Harvard, because Gerald said disparaging things about women. But when the fight happens, Quentin doesn't "snap back to reality"; we only find out this is what's been happning much later, on page 162:

say it again
Dalton Ames
her blood surged steadily beating and beating against my hand
It kept on running for a long time, but my face felt cold and sort of dead, and my eye, and the cut place on my finger was smarting again...

The last line flips back to the present (Quentin's friends are washing him under the pump) but without italics, because Quentin is mixing up past and present so much.

Now if you think about the exchange on page 159, almost certainly, it was *Gerald* who said "they're all bitches" and NOT Dalton Ames. There are quite a few little hints which suggest Dalton Ames is not at all a bad fellow. (He keeps asking after Caddy; he's obviously concerned about her. He's also as nice as he can be to Quentin.) But Gerald is an asshole.

[Anonymouṡ No.20842823]

>>20842057

Chapter 2 is 100 pages long and Quentin is constantly jumping from flashback to pondering to reality, often several times in the same sentence. I can't go through every twist and turn; it would take hours. You have to say exactly which bit puzzles you.

Ignoring the flashbacks, random thoughts, etc here's the last half of chapter 2. Just the objective timeline of Quentin's last day on earth, mapped to page number:

115-121 Q. Talks to the boys fishing at the bridge on the river

122-127 Q. goes to the shop & buys bread for the little Italian girl

128-131 Q. tries to find where the girl lives. Eventually he just gives her a coin and runs off to be rid of her.

132-134 Q. wanders off into the countryside. Little girl reappears.

135-136 Q. goes back to the river with the girl. He thinks she must live somewhere around there. The boys don't want a girl looking at them and chase them off.

137-139 The girl's brother appears with the police. He assumes Q. is kidnapping the girl & attacks him. Q is arrested.

140 Q.'s friends Spoade & Shreve appear, together with a woman called Mrs Bland & another undergraduate called Gerald, & some girls. [They were all supposed to be going on a picnic.]

141-144 They go to the police office; Q. has to pay a hefty fine to be done with the matter.

145-162 They head off picnicward. Mrs Bland says that the police were absurd to suspect Q. of being a child-molestor, but she isn't quite certain he is innocent. (Only Shreve is 100% sure he is.) Q. goes off into a massive flashback about himself, Caddy and Dalton Ames.

163-165 Q. comes out of the flashback. We learn that Gerald said some vaguely unsavoury things at the picnic and Q picked a fight with him and got beat up. Spoade & Shreve wash Q down.

166 Q says he's not going back to the picnic. He asks his friends to apologize for him.

167-9 Q wanders along beside the river. It's evening by now.

169-70 Q. rides the streetcar for a little while to get back to his rooms at University.

170-178 Q. changes his clothes in his room, washes, brushes his hair, etc. Finally leaves to go and drown himself in the river.

[Anonymous No.20843241]

>>20838677
the section really tries to highlight Quentin's culture shock. i think my perception might be skewed after reading absalom, absalom, but you can tell that he wants to believe in a world that doesn't exist anymore and maybe never existed at all. if you've ever moved between north/south on the east coast US, you'll know just how differently history is taught. suddenly realizing you are not as attractive, intelligent, wealthy, healthy, or loved as you previously believed is enough to drive someone insane.