Classics Without All the Class discussion

Mrs. Compton

Mr. Compton

Quentin (Caddy's daughter)

Luster

Uncle Maury

Herbert

Dalton

Deacon

Shreve

Anyone else that struck you

Mrs. Compton was tiresome and annoying with her self-pity, guilting her family any chance she had. Her brother , Uncle Maury, was very creepy. Mr. Compton said some confusing things to his kids but I am pretty sure he meant well.

Which came first the chicken or the egg? Mrs. Compson's passive/aggressive hypochondria or Mr. Compson's alcoholism? And what drove either of them to their crutch of choice? Mrs. Compson's complete absence in her role as a mother goes a long way toward explaining her children's behavior as does her husband's detachedness. Without Dilcy the children would have run wild. I wasn't sure what Uncle Maury's role was in the story except to poke fun at Mrs. Compson's misplaced pride in her own Bascomb family name as he is nothing but a deadbeat leech.

I liked Shreve and Deacon - they seemed to be about the only normal characters in the book. Another character that I couldn't figure out was the small girl that Quentin met in the bakery. I can understand why she followed him around after he bought her the rolls, but I don't understand why Faulkner wrote her into the story? It annoyed me for some reason.

I read an interesting theory on the little girl in the bakery. Perhaps Quentin helping the foreign child get back to her home represented dissent from the home/society he grew up in where white people ruled and other ethnicities were second class and not worthy of such consideration.

I was poking around online yesterday to see if I could find out anything about the little girl and I found something about an interview in which Faulkner said that he had a thought snippet about a dirty little girl playing in her front lawn and that was the basis for The Sound and the Fury. So maybe the dirty little girl in the bakery is his nod to his thought, or maybe there is a symbolic connection between Caddy's dirty underclothes and the girl in the bakery. Perhaps he helped her because she reminded him of Caddy. It just seemed an awkward storyline - out of place in Quentin's section of self-absorption, as did the chance meeting with his friends which was precipitated by his encounter with the little girl. And yes Beth - I agree - it was very obvious that the bakery owner had no use for the little girl and that seemed to be a class issue.

Maybe it was a poke at Northerners and their bias against immigrants.