A rhetorical analysis on Quentin Compson - a suicidal character within a classic book written about Antebellum Southern Society using a unique stream of consciousness style.
You are a Harvard Student during the 19th Century walking along Boston with a couple things in mind. Your family is from the South, yet you never felt that you fully belonged at home or in college. Welcome to the tragic dilemma of Quentin Compson - a suicidal young man who finds himself too far from home to reap the consequences of his strayed thoughts and actions.
With the ticking of the clock, Quentin plans to end his life on one afternoon, where the reader journeys with him in order to see why he has come to this low point in his life, only to realize that Quentin does not consider it a low point at all. In the following essay, Giovanna Napoleone describes a deep and surprising rationale of Quentin's bildungsroman.
"...In each, the subject is both the agent and the victim, at once active and passive, a conjunction of masculine and feminine” (Irwin 311)."
Below you will find the complete essay, and if you have any questions, feel free to contact the author through the website contact information!
Quentin's Sacrifice
By Giovanna Napoleone
In the book The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, the author tells the story of Quentin Compson, a Southern man in post Civil War United States, who ends up committing suicide in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In order for his readers to analyze the mental causes of Quentin’s suicide, Faulkner uses biblical allusions to convey the idea that Quentin imagines himself as a modern day Christ and commits suicide in order to purify himself of his sister’s sins.
In the novel The Sound and the Fury, Quentin Compson has an infatuation with his sister Caddy’s loss of virginal innocence; He even goes as far as to compare her to Eve in the Bible when he states that Caddy was the “voice that breathed over Eden” (Faulkner 52) because in his mind, Caddy has sinned against God such as Eve did in Genesis 3.8 by losing her virginity. In the bible story, Eve eats a forbidden apple - the fruit of knowledge - which unleashes all sins into the world. Similarly, the idea of Caddy having intercourse before marriage in Quentin’s mind causes her to be, as Andrès Bleikasten author of “The Quest for Eurydice” states, “a turbulent little Eve” who is a “symbol of guilt and sin” (Bleikasten 422). Although Quentin is by no means responsible for the actions of his sister, he decides to commit suicide for her sins due to his Christ complex. Faulkner’s appendix about Quentin states that he desired to “cast himself and his sister both into hell, where he could guard her forever and keep her forevermore intact amid the eternal fires” (Appendix 207-208) because Quentin believes that the punishment of himself for Caddy’s sins will lead to salvation or preservation - such as if Adam never let Eve consume the apple.
Quentin’s sacrificial Christ complex continues to be shown through biblical allusions in his narrative when Faulkner footnotes a reference to John 19.34. In the novel, Quentin claims that a “wound in what side that not for me died not” (Faulkner 111) which connects to the John 19.34 biblical story of “blood and water” (John 19.34) pouring from Jesus’ wound when he was dead instead of only blood. The idea of water as a pure and religious entity which alleviates sin and pain is universal in both the Bible through the rituals of Baptism and Quentin’s death; In the Bible, Baptism is meant to cleanse newborns of their sins or renew life and in The Sound and the Fury Quentin believes that ending his life by suicide in water will cleanse him of his sins. This idea of Baptism and water as cleansing one from their sins is furthered by Faulkner’s reference to the Rock of Ages Hymn within the same footnote of the book as the John 19.34 story which states “Wash me, Savior, or I die” (Stanza 3) and “Save from wrath and make me pure” (Stanza 4). The biblical allusion to water as a purifying entity explains that Quentin kills himself by drowning because he desires to purify, Christianize, and sanctify himself even though in reality he may not be Christ-like. For example, Quentin figures that he will be judged for his sins once he drowns himself by alluding to Revelation 20.13 when “[Christ] will Rise” (Faulkner 51) to judge “every man according to their works” after “ the sea gave up the dead which were in it” (Revelation 20.13). Quentin is knowledgable of the fact that he should not commit suicide since suicide itself is a sin to God just as Caddy’s loss of virginity is. However, due to his Christ complex of needing to relieve himself and the world of Caddy’s sins, Quentin resorts to self-sacrifice - ironically generating sins of his own.
Towards the very end of his narrative and imminent death, Quentin states that he could hear the “swine untethered in pairs rushing coupled into the sea” (Faulkner 112), which alludes to the biblical story of the Demons and the Pigs where Jesus expels demonic spirits from people by transferring them into pigs who proceed to drown in the sea (Matthew 8.28-32 and Luke 8.26-34). The idea that Quentin desires to witness vessels of sin be gone through water demonstrate that Quentin believes his suicidal drowning will result in the expulsion of his demons, or the knowledge of Caddy’s sins. By comparing Quentin to the pigs and Caddy to the humans who the demons were transferred from, it is clear that Quentin desires to sacrifice himself as a “swine” for Caddy’s evil doings and loss of innocence because although Caddy as a vessel can handle her sins, Quentin feels as if he can not live with the responsibility of them. In John T. Irwin’s article “Doubling Incest”, the connection between Quentin and Christ is stated effectively, as the “link between Quentin’s suicide and Christ’s sacrifice” is that “in each, the subject is both the agent and the victim, at once active and passive, a conjunction of masculine and feminine” (Irwin 311); Christ was the one who offered himself as a sacrifice for the sins of others that he would forgive, yet his crucifixion made him a martyr for the universal Christian religion. In a similar yet demented way, Quentin’s Christ complex is the cause for his suicide and need for purification, yet his death makes himself the victim of Caddy’s sins.
Despite claims that even though Quentin has a hero complex he does not see himself as Christ, it is clear that he does have unrealistic fantasies of that connection due to his constant comparison of himself with Christ through time and other situations. At the beginning of the novel, Quentin remembers his father’s statement that “Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels” (Faulkner 95-96) which suggests that Quentin identifies with Christ because they are both haunted by time. In addition, when Quentin connects himself to Christ by stating that he had “a pattern of blood [on his shirt that] he could call that the one Christ was wearing” (Faulkner 109), Quentin solidifies his distorted Christ complex through the significance of his own split blood. Further, by alluding to the Christian figure Saint Francis of Assisi who, according to Faulkner’s footnote, “Welcome[s] sister death” (Faulkner 49), Quentin creates a parallel between himself and holy Christian figures since he too welcomes death through suicide.
In brief, as William Faulkner uses biblical allusions in The Sound and the Fury to demonstrate Quentin Compson’s Christ complex for his sister’s sins that lead to his suicide, the reader is left to determine if Quentin’s sacrifice is actually heroic or akin to the “demon-possessed men” (Matthew 8.28-32 and Luke 8.26-34) who deserved to drown in the sea.
Bibliography
Irwin, John T. “Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of
Faulkner.” American Literature, vol. 48, no. 3, 1976, pp. 407. Rpt. in The Sound and the
Fury. By William Faulkner. W. W. Norton & Company, 3rd ed, 1994. Print.
Bleikasten, André. “The Most Splendid Failure: Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.” Indiana
University Press, 1976, pp. 41-55. Rpt. in The Sound and the Fury. By William
Faulkner. W. W. Norton & Company, 3rd ed, 1994. Print.
Faulkner, William. “The Sound and the Fury.” Norton Critical Editions, W. W. Norton &
Company, 3rd ed, 1994. Print.
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