ABSTRACT
It is now possible to say confidently that the greatest suffering ofwhich American fiction has any record occurred in the summer of 1909 and was inflicted on Quentin Compson. You will remember, if you succeeded in distinguishing Quentin from his niece in The Sound and theFury, that late in that summer he made harrowing discoveries about his sister Candace. Not only was she pregnant outside the law but also, what seared Quentin's purity much worse, she had lost her virginity. In the agony of his betrayed reverence for her, he undertook to kill both himself and her but ended by merely telling their father that he had committed incest with her. This blend of wish-fulfilment and Southern chivalry did not impress Mr.Jason Richmond Compson, who advised his son to take a vacation, adding, in one of the best lines Mr. Faulkner ever wrote, 'watching pennies has healed more scars than Jesus.' Quentin went on to Harvard, where, however, the yeasts of guilt, expiation, and revenge that are Mr. Faulkner's usual themes so worked in him that he eventually killed himself, somewhere in the vicinity of the Brighton abattoir. But at the end of The Sound andthe Furynot all the returns were in. It now appears that only a little while after he was pressing a knife to Candace's throat-I make it about a
month-Quentin had to watch the last act of doom's pitilessengulfing of the Sutpens, another family handicapped by a curse.
