Molly Gendelman

Professor Allred

Blog #3

Fifty Shades of Pride

Faulkner portrays pride as the secret weapon the South had during the Civil War that the North did not seem to understand. Despite ultimately losing, the South always retained a reputation of sorts for still having their pride.  In The Unvanquished, Readers pick up on pride the most in Bayard’s grandmother, Miss Rosa, but the rest of the main characters seem to have their own amounts of pride too, and during the war it seemed there was a lot to be proud of. Bayard has great pride for his father, who Faulkner makes feel is a man who radiates power and respect, “And that’s what I mean: about his doing bigger things than he was. He could have stood on the same level with Granny and he would have only needed to bend his head a little for her to kiss him. But he didn’t. He stopped two steps below her, with his head bared and his forehead held for her to touch her lips to, and the fact that Granny had to stoop a little now took nothing from the illusion of height and size he wore for us at least” (10). Bayard’s pride for his father even comes from the outside, like when he runs into Uncle Buck while on their way to Memphis. Uncle Buck says, “I wont say God take care of you an your grandma on the road, boy, because by Godfrey you dont need God’s nor nobody else’s help; all you got to say is ‘I’m John Sartoris’ boy; rabbits, hunt the canebrake’ and then watch the blue bellied sons of bitches fly” (52). His father, though he does not say much, takes pride in his horse, Jupiter, for being a terrific specimen of a horse that the Northerners would desperately want. Faulkner’s initial description of Jupiter on page 8 is an example of the importance and value placed on Jupiter, and he describes the horse in detail again on page 65.
Bayard also takes pride in his home and his family’s land, another theme of sorts that southerners seem to be born with: love of their land. When on their way to Memphis, Faulkner reveals that Bayard brought dirt from home with him, “So I took the snuff box from my pocket and emptied half the soil (it was more than Sartoris earth; it was Vicksburg too: the yelling in it, the embattled, the iron-worn, the supremely invincible) into his hand” (55).
Bayard’s grandmother Miss Rosa has the most straightforward and perhaps understandable pride. She is an elderly white lady of Southern nobility, who takes pride in her family, her reputation and dignity. When Bayard and Ringo shoot the Yankees’ horse and they come in the house searching for them, Granny uses several forms of pride to protect them. She is extremely polite to the soldiers searching the house, all the while extremely calm. Even as they search her house without asking permission, she offers the Colonel who ends the search some refreshment before he leaves, “‘Louvinia,” Granny said, “conduct the gentleman to the dining room and serve him with what we have” (33). This pride in being polite and hospitable even to an enemy is a running pattern throughout the south, and Faulkner successfully uses her to portray such people during the war. Her lies about living alone are successful because she maintains a quiet dignity and relies on this unspoken but ever-present pride that Southerners seem to have without even trying. Multiple times throughout the novel, Faulkner describes how properly she conducts herself without even trying, “I looked at Granny eating, with her hat sitting on the exact top of her head and Ringo looking at me across the back of Granny’s chair with his eyes rolling a little” (38). Several pages later Faulkner repeats this, “We put the trunk into the wagon, along with the musket and the basket of food and the bedclothing, and got in ourselves—Granny on the seat beside Joby, the bonnet on the exact top of her head and the parasol raised before the dew had begun to fall—and we drove away” (45). And when yankees come to burn down their house and their servant Loosh shows them where they hid their silver, she sends Bayard and Ringo to Mrs. Compson’s for a hat, parasol, and hand mirror (78).
Ringo, despite not being white, also displays immense pride in certain ways that Faulkner highlights. For example, when trying to decide if he ever tried coconut cake or not, “Because he said that he would rather just maybe have tasted coconut cake without remembering it than to know for certain he had not; that if he were to describe the wrong kind of cake, he would never taste coconut cake as long as he lived” (20). To Ringo, tasting the cake and not remembering is better than having not tasted it at all, and he takes pride in thinking that he did indeed taste it.
The novel’s title is absolutely perfect for the story: The Unvanquished speaks of the pride that endured through the war, and could not and would not be destroyed.  While the people in the south may have lost the war, and perhaps a great part of their general pride, their pride in being Southerners remains unvanquished. And while I have yet to finish the story, Faulkner is leading me to think that their pride will never be vanquished.

A sense of doom enters The Unvanquished early in the first story, “Ambuscade,” as Loosh sweeps away the “living map” of the battle of Vicksburg (which we learn on page 18 the Confederates have already lost- and which, cutting off control of the Mississippi River, marks the Union Army’s advance*) that young Bayard and Ringo have built, and as Bayard’s father, John Sartoris, arrives home unexpectedly on his “gaunt horse” in his “weathered gray coat” with “tarnished buttons” and “frayed braid”(10). In TSAF we read how the sense of smell linked to powerful emotion and memory, and Faulkner uses it in this work to connect the reader to Bayard’s experience of the moment, usually the experience of loss. One of the most powerful of these moments is Bayard’s discovery of the death of Granny Rosa at the hands of Grumby’s Independents in “Riposte in Tertio.”

Our first example linking Bayard’s coming to knowledge of loss through the sense of smell comes with his father’s visit home to bury the family silver and hide the livestock: “Then I began to smell it again … that odor in his clothes and beard and flesh too which I believed was the smell of powder and glory, the elected victorious but know better now: know now to have been only the will to endure, a sardonic and even humorous declining of self-delusion which is not even kin to that optimism which believes that that which is about to happen to us can probably be the worst which we can suffer” (U 10). Bayard senses that all is not well and the heroic image of his father on his once noble horse, Jupiter, begins to get smaller. By the third story, “Raid,” Bayard’s father gets smaller as he returns like a tramp in patched, stolen clothing, swordless and seems to “emanate a kind of humility and apology” (95). Each story reflects Bayard’s growing knowledge of the expanding destruction of the Civil War and with each tale told he reminds us that he knows better now and his childish beliefs in the glory of the South have been confused and reduced by experience.

As Bayard grows from boy to man, the ways of the Old South are breaking down, seen profoundly as Granny’s moral code warps to adapt to survival in wartime. She begins as the pious aunt who washes the boys’ mouths out with soap when they curse and prays for forgiveness for the lie she tells to the Yankee soldier to protect them and ends as the double-crossed, murdered mastermind of a grand scheme to steal mules, horses, and supplies from Yankee troops. Faulkner deepens the conflicted representation of Granny by having her give mules and supplies to the starving tenant farmers in church, but complicates her status by having Ringo describe her as almost considering herself as Godlike: “She cide what she want and then she kneel down about ten seconds and tell God what she aim to do and then she git up and do hit. And them that dont like hit can git outen the way or git trompled” (93). How are we to interpret Faulkner’s presentation of Granny? Granny is both racially and socially unbending but morally bending. Both sides can be argued: she is the rigid (though shrinking) figure of the Old South that stands to the last for the righteous cause –or- the clearest example of the unbending, evil code of the slave South that corrupts itself to a diminished end in disgrace. I think Faulkner tips his hand a little as Bayard sees Granny getting smaller: “… she looked littler than anybody I could remember, like during the four years she hadn’t got any older or weaker, but just littler and straighter and straighter and more and more indomitable” (143). Bayard knows better now.

Granny’s end, and the end of the Old South for Bayard, comes in “Riposte in Tertio.” Bayard tries to stop Granny from her last scam, but gives up, symbolizing his letting go of her beliefs and her code of the South. Again, Faulkner uses the sense of smell to empower Bayard’s retelling of discovering his dead grandmother: “… it was the powder I smelled, stronger even than the tallow. I couldn’t seem to breathe for the smell of the powder, looking at Granny. She had looked a little alive, but now she looked like she had collapsed, like she had been made out of a lot of little thin dry light sticks notched together and braced with cord, and now the cord had broken and all the little sticks had collapsed in a quiet heap on the floor, and somebody had spread a clean and faded calico dress over them” (154). As the railroad made of steel had been destroyed by the Union Army to break the South apart, so the cord that holds Granny together (and that bound the trunk full of the silver that represented the wealth and class of the family) and the code of the Old South, is destroyed both from the evil within and the evil of the New South that comes with Grumby’s Independents. At the end of “Riposte in Tertio” Bayard is engulfed in the smell of loss that he knows better now represents the world between old and new.

{*In May and June of 1863, Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s armies converged on Vicksburg, investing the city and entrapping a Confederate army under Lt. Gen. John Pemberton. On July 4, Vicksburg surrendered after prolonged siege operations. This was the culmination of one of the most brilliant military campaigns of the war. With the loss of Pemberton’s army and this vital stronghold on the Mississippi, the Confederacy was effectively split in half. Grant’s successes in the West boosted his reputation, leading ultimately to his appointment as General-in-Chief of the Union armies (http://www.civilwar.org/battlefields/vicksburg.html)}

Note: this reading only applies to the novel’s first two chapters, “Ambuscade” and “Retreat”

The brisk flow of The Unvanquished is so hurried that the narrative’s present moment often seems to violently occupy the same space as its future events and interactions. For example, within what appears to constitute the same spatial, temporal and narrative breath, Bayard chastises Ringo for “looking behind every tree we passed for Yankees”, yet in almost the same moment, Yankee’s have surrounded the group’s wagon and Bayard notes Granny “standing up in the wagon and beating the five men about their heads and shoulders with the umbrella while they unfastened the traces and cut the harness of the mules with pocket knives”(58). To understand how the speed of the narrative operates formally in this passage, it’s important to note Faulkner’s staccato prose. He often substitutes commas for periods, in a manner that disorients the logical flow of movement. As Bayard notes upon being overtaken, “It was fast, like that”.  

Yet while the textual swiftness of The Unvanquished ushers a condition of narrative progress that rushes into the future and therefore obviates the textual past, the characters we encounter within the text appear to have a less clarified relationship to future movement. In this way, the majority of characters oscillate between attempting to move into some future space- primarily Memphis – and consistently falling back to Jefferson, their place of origin. We initially see characters oscillating between future spaces and past spaces through Marse John’s series of returns and departures to and from Jefferson. And even in his absence, Marse John’s presence either seems to haunt the home so much so that his sporadic returns are the obsession of all who await his arrival. The anxiety that exists between future and past spaces also registers in the trip Bayard, Ringo, Joby and Granny attempt to make to Memphis. Ringo’s fixation with searching for Yankees behind trees, trees that the wagon has already surpassed, intimates his obsessive view of the past and inability to depart with his origins. After the party traveling to Memphis is attacked by group of Yankees, Bayard and Ringo disband from Granny and Joby to search for the mules that have been cut loose. Yet their scattered attempt to reclaim the horses intended to take them to a new space is foiled by Marse John, who finds them in the woods and sees them back to Jefferson where Granny and Joby await them. The journey that had the group on the road to Memphis is actually a circuitous one that delivers them back to their point of origin.

Loosh is arguably the only character whose relationship to future spaces seems to break with the anxiety and inability to pursue future spaces all of the other characters face. His clairvoyance regarding the fall of Vicksburg and Corinth can be argued not only as his desire to enter future spaces, but his ability to see into future spaces. In this sense, Loosh imagines a future that divides with the spatial and temporal encapsulations the other characters experience.

The way that the novel reveals the nature of war through the eyes of the boys Bayard and Ringo indicates that, for them, war is a belief rather than an event.  Their understanding of war depends on what others tell them or on mere word associations rather than on experiential knowledge.  The narrator claims, “So we knew a war existed; we had to believe that, just as we had to believe that the name for the sort of life we had led for the last three years was hardship and suffering.  Yet we had no proof of it” (U 94).  By likening his belief in the war to his belief in the word for type of lifestyle he leads, the narrator indicates the process by which he comes to know grand concepts such as war and lifestyle.  This textual moment shows that the boys rely on the fundamental learning process of association, a process in which words gain meaning when they are linked to known objects, in order give meaning to the descriptive terms “hardship” and “suffering.”  The comparison in the quote above indicates that this is the manner by which the boys come to form associations with the term war.

The narrator indicates the tenuous nature of this learning process, which relies upon a teacher or informed individual to make connections between word and object for the learner, when he states that he “had to believe.”  The young narrator must trust what he is told about the link between the terms “sort of life” and “hardship” and “suffering” since he lacks the experience and evidence to claim otherwise.  Likewise, Bayard and Ringo “had” to believe that a war existed since they lacked a prior conception of the word war and must trust others to make this connection for them.  In this way, their knowledge of war constitutes an act of faith both in the individual who conveys the knowledge and in the fragment of knowledge conveyed.

To complicate matters, the intangible nature of war and the boys’ distance from actual battle makes it a more difficult concept to comprehend.  Like the connection between “hardship” and “sort of life,” the word war gains meaning when it is linked to evidence of its existence.  Such evidence might consist of returning injured soldiers, the presence of Union troops, the burning of houses, and the march of African Americans.  Nonetheless, because this evidence can be explained by other incidents besides war, it does not necessarily constitute definitive proof of war for the narrator.  For example, he points out that he saw men return “home with actual arms and legs missing.  But that was it: men had lost arms and legs in sawmills” (U 94).  The skepticism expressed by the narrator reveals that the war that he knows exists, exists in idea and not necessarily in concrete evidence.  The indefinite nature of such evidence is what leads him to claim that “we had no proof of it.”  When the narrator claims that “we knew a war existed” but qualifies this claim with the phrase “Yet we had no proof of it,” he reveals that his knowledge of this concept is based on a system of belief that is supported by knowledge provided to him by others rather than by personal experience.

Furthermore, the changes in the father’s appearance from one who exudes victory to one racked by defeat stretches the narrator’s understanding of war in order to encompass both states.  In the beginning, the father’s smell of gun powder and his larger-than-life appearance indicate to Bayard that war is a glorious endeavor.  He formulates a connection between war and victory based on the evidence—i.e. the “odor in his clothes and beard and flesh”—that his father presents upon his return.  The narrator believes that this evidence is “the smell of powder and glory, the elected victorious” (U 10).  The connection between war and victor is later challenged when the father returns and his presence “seemed…to emanate a kind of humility and apology” (U 95).  This changed appearance unsettles the prior association that the narrator had formed with the concept war.  As before, the narrator must believe that war is the cause of his father’s appearance albeit a greatly changed appearance.  Such a change tries the narrator’s faith that a war exists.

In conclusion, the novel reveals that war is not a concrete concept or event for Bayard and Ringo.  It is a belief.  It is an intangible and invisible entity that they must believe exists because they are told.  And, they must incorporate inconclusive evidence into this belief in order to give it meaning.  The boys’ struggle to comprehend war points to its ephemeral quality which is expressed in the way it presents only through fragments and pieces of evidence.

The first four chapters of The Unvanquished follow Bayard Sartoris’s narration as he recounts his formative years. It is difficult to know, at times, whether he is telling the whole truth— something which he fully acknowledges and blames on being a child. His first remarks about John Sartoris’s intimidating stature and presence reveal Bayard’s idolatry of his father. But he quickly reevaluates his childish memories and paints his father in a more realistic light. “And that was it too; Father was everywhere, with a sapling under each arm going through the brush and briers almost faster than the mules; racking the nails into place while Joby and Loosh were still arguing about which end of the rail went where. That was it: not that father worked faster and harder than anyone else, even though you do look bigger (to twelve, at least, to me and Ringo at twelve, at least) standing still and saying, “Do this or that” to the ones who are doing it; it was the way he did it” (U 12). Bayard, as an adult, identifies real factors of his father’s position and character, which he originally missed. His stories, as told to the reader, are peppered with the reflective insight of adulthood. He picks apart his memories, trying to distinguish reality from fiction. All of which leaves the reader wondering—can we trust Bayard Sartoris? Or does the mixture of childish naivete and adult commentary create a narrator that is too unreliable?

Bayard acknowledges moments in which he missed the major details of the situation, such as when his cousin told them all about the railroad incident. “She probably told us the reason for it (she must have known)—what point of strategy, what desperate gamble not for preservation, since hope of that was gone, but at least for prolongation, which it served. But that meant nothing to us. We didn’t hear, we didn’t even listen; we sat there in that cabin and waited and watched that railroad which no longer existed, which was now […] for all of them who were there and saw when Ringo and I were not” (U 96). Indeed, it is unclear for the reader what actually happened with the railroad. A little research reveals a connection to a real Civil War locomotive chase in which the opposing sides raced for Chattanooga in commandeered trains, with one destroying the tracks along the way. Bayard misses these details and sees only the implications—the railroad tracks destroyed, which means that he and Ringo will not see a train come through Hawkhurst. This has a huge impact on his relationship with Ringo. Although Bayard arrived at Hawkhurst with the upper hand, having seen a train before, they have both seen the tracks and heard about the incident. Neither of them will see a train anytime soon and they are back on a level playing field. From this point on, Ringo seems to gradually gain the upper hand. Bayard watches Ringo take part in his grandmother’s subterfuge to steal and re-sell mules to the Union army. He echoes his father’s assertion that Ringo is smarter than he is and remains almost entirely silent throughout this section. It is almost as if he is leaving something out. Did Bayard try to participate in the mule-selling scheme, but was turned down by Granny? Did he even understand what they were doing at the time, or has he worked out the details as an adult?

When Bayard does speak up it is to dissuade his grandmother from going to confront Grumby.  “‘Then you shant go,’ I said, ‘I’m stronger than you are; I’ll hold you’” (U 152). Bayard briefly recounts his intervention before going on to deny it. “We tried. I keep on saying that because I know now that I didn’t. I could have held her, turned the wagon, driven away, holding her in it. I was just fifteen, and for most of my life her face had been the first thing I saw in the morning and the last thing I saw at night, but I could have stopped her and I didn’t” (U 153). Even with his corrections and adjustments to the story, Bayard Sartoris is an unreliable narrator. But those moments of unreliability are the most important to this story, because it is about fiction as much as fact. Bayard’s fictions reveal the most about his character and his motivations. The Unvanquished is less about the Civil War and racial injustice and more about Bayard Sartoris and his journey. His storytelling uncovers as much as the stories themselves. Here, there is an undeniable connection to the author.  “Faulkner’s life was all about stories— making them up, making them over, even making them true. As a child in Oxford, Mississippi, he was a famous storyteller, often spinning tales with more verisimilitude than veracity” (Porter 1). Much like his Bayard’s father, whose impact comes from the way in which he does things, Bayard’s character will be shaped by the way in which he tells his story.

What I enjoyed most about the beginning chapters is that the reader gets to see ideas that are heavy, through the eyes of a child. Through Bayard, the reader is forced to reevaluate the “glories” seen in war and gets to see Ringo as more of an equal to Bayard rather than a slave. John Sartoris is a very big presence in the novel, even when he is not physically there. For Bayard, his father was not only physically dominant, but “Father was everywhere”(12). Here we see one of those images that only a child can see and be apart of – the idolization of a father, especially one that has gone to war. Bayard took pride in his father, and although he doesn’t really understand the war, he knows that he wants his side to win. Bayard and Ringo have both been taught to root for the South, and demonize the Northern soldiers and their cause, “I don’t know what we had expected to see but we knew what was at once; I remember thinking He looks just like a man”(25). Right before Ringo and Bayard shoot the soldier (actually a horse), Bayard has this moment where the soldier becomes a man, rather than a representation of the enemy. Ringo especially is in a weird position because on one hand he feels connected the South and to the Sartoris family, but on the other a Union win can lead to his freedom.

The relationship between Bayard and Ringo is interesting because although Ringo is smarter, Bayard is born white, therefore in the novel, he is more superior than Ringo. But there is this reliance that they both have on one another in order to reach their full potentials. This realization, this unity, is seen at the start of the novel when Bayard says, “Ringo and I had been born in the same month and had both fed at the same breast and eaten together so long… Maybe he wasn’t a nigger anymore or maybe I wasn’t a white boy anymore, the two of us neither, not even people any longer”(7).  I think that this equality that is seen at the start of the novel, while both are still children, will eventually fade. Even during the mule scam, Bayard feels insecure about how useful Ringo has been. I think that as the boys get older, society and its ideas on race will get to them, and they will never be able to achieve the unity and the comradery that they had as children,“We- Ringo and I – ran as one, in midstride out of frozen immobility”(8). This moment reminds me of the moment in Nabokov’s Lolita when Humbert interacts with his double for the first time, saying “ he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us”(Nabokov 299). Much like the moment when Ringo and Bayard are running, they become indistinguishable from each other, further solidifying their bond.

In the final section of TSAF, “April Eighth, 1928.” we are met with a variety of third person character descriptions that paint pictures in both form and content. I will explore descriptions of and interactions between the women in this section and how they reflect their individual and joint habitual domestic lives. I was first taken by these descriptions in the section’s first sighting of Mrs. Compson, when she is calling for Dilsey from the stairs in the early morning: “In the other hand she held a red rubber hot water bottle and she stood at the head of the back stairway, calling ‘Dilsey’ at steady and inflectionless intervals into the quiet stairwell that descended into complete darkness… ‘Dilsey,’ she called, without inflection or emphasis or haste, as though she were not listening for a reply at all. ‘Dilsey.'” (267). The way in which Mrs. Compson calls for Dilsey is primarily described in what is not, rather than what is; she is “not listening”, “inflectionless” (267, emphasis my own) and the scene is complementarily riddled with passive undertones that showcase Mrs. Compson’s stationary self at the top of the stairs, the surrounding quiet darkness, and the apathetic calls to Dilsey in a chorus of blasé repetitions (that of Dilsey’s name, as well as Faulkner’s repeated use of the descriptor “inflection”). Faulkner solidifies this scene when he writes that her calls were “without inflection or emphasis or haste,” and it struck me that what is so powerful here is his insistence in the lack: her tone was not filled with, say, lethargy, apathy, or tiredness, for instance, but rather, without the aforementioned traits. Describing Mrs. Compson’s calls in what they are not perhaps mirrors her withering existence and ways in which she herself feels she is lacking.

Similarly, just three pages later, we get a passive description of Dilsey singing in the kitchen, before she is to be interrupted by Mrs. Compson. Faulkner writes, “As she ground the sifter steadily above the bread board, she sang, to herself at first, something without particular tune or words, repetitive, mournful and plaintive, austere, as she ground a faint, steady snowing of flower onto the bread board… and presently she was singing louder, as if her voice too had been thawed out by the growing warmth, and then Mrs Compson called her name again from within the house… calling her name with machinelike regularity” (270).  The continued emphasis on repetition that Faulkner showcases here, in both Dilsey’s tune and Mrs. Compson’s calling, seems to illuminate the types of daily interactions that occur in the Compson household. I think it is interesting that one can see how Dilsey’s song moves from what it is not, “without particular tune…” to what it is, “plaintive, austere…” until she is cut short by Mrs. Compson’s own song of repetitive, habitual need. Faulkner notes how Dilsey’s energy and song seemed to warm up with the room’s physical temperature, which also follows the active trajectory of the descriptions of Dilsey, mentioned above. These interactions are telling in regards to each woman’s relationship with one another, especially in how each short scene is characterized by inactive, repetitive details, and the physical inactivity that shrouds these interactions: they engage with each other in early morning darkness, or complete invisibility by communicating from different rooms of the house. Oftentimes, when there is talk of physical movement in their interactions, it is of stillness or great slowness, for example, of one of the many descriptions of Dilsey on the stairs: “yet descending the stairs with a sort of painful and terrific slowness that would have become maddening…” (268). Ultimately, the descriptions of Dilsey and Mrs. Compson are interestingly comparable and contain continual auras of habitual slowness, repetitiveness, and strong opinions towards one another and to the other members of the household.

“I must go away you keep the others I’ll take Jason and go where nobody knows us so he’ll have a chance to grow up and forget all this the others don’t love me they have never loved anything with that streak of Compson selfishness and false pride Jason was the only one my heart went out to without dread” (102). Despite Caroline Compson’s imploration for escape, her and Jason are two of the very few left at the Compson home after the others have gotten out (whether willingly or not). This circumstance reinforces the particular bond between the characters – one that Caroline created early in his life by declaring him a true Bascomb. Her differentiation between Compson children and Bascomb children appears in all three Compson narratives. We can assume that she reiterated this point many times, therefore isolating Jason from her other children and creating an us-versus-them dynamic.

Although Caroline doesn’t have Compson blood, she did birth all of her children, which constitutes them as family. She repeats the phrase “my own flesh and blood” over and over. Regardless of which bloodline they lean toward, Caroline can claim all four of the children as her flesh and blood. Jason being a full Bascomb and not having had children, cannot. His mother is his only “true” family. Benjy and Quentin aren’t his kin any more than Luster or Earl. It’s “us versus them”; Jason versus the rest of the world. And Jason is certain that the world is out to get him.

Jason highlights many disadvantages and setbacks that have shaped his life and led to his current position in the world. “Well, Jason likes work. I says no I never had university advantages because at Harvard they teach you how to go for a swim at night without knowing how to swim and at Sewanee they don’t even teach you what water is” (196). Jason connects education to identity and believes that people wrongly assume something about his character – that he prefers to work, over pursuing a degree. Yet, in his mind, he was denied the chance at a real education.

Even the setbacks in his life manifest as more than just unfortunate moments. “I says I reckon you’ll think twice before you deprive me of a job that was promised me. I was a kid then. I believed folks when they said they’d do things. I’ve learned better since” (206). Jason himself admits that Herbert’s proposed bank job may have been more fantasy then reality, but he still views the loss of it as something actively done against him.

And so, he suffers, He suffers:

• Being asked for money by Quentin, Lorraine, and Luster
• Working at Earl’s shop
• Driving Quentin to school
• A headache
• Not getting someone to put the tire in the car when he asked
• Having the air let out of the tire
• Talking to Caddy
• The smell of gasoline or looking at water, which both make him sick
• Running out of blank checks
• Being the head of the household and “responsible” for feeding everyone in it
• Waiting for meals
• Benjy’s bellowing
• Keeping Benjy at the Compson home and out of sight
• Losing money on the stock market
• Being “on the clock” at work
• The effects of having the show in town
• His mother’s constant meddling
• Maintaining the position as the only Compson child whose name hasn’t been a byline in town

Things are constantly being done to Jason, so much so that you must wonder whether he enjoys the suffering a little. He does identify this quality in Caroline – “Little they cared how wet I got, because then Mother could have a whale of a time being afraid I was taking pneumonia” (201). His own fixation on every little way in which the world is against him mirrors his mother’s behavior and influences his future outlook and interactions. Maybe he doesn’t want misfortune, but he expects it. Jason can find suffering in any situation and this tainted perspective parallels the way in which Caroline embraces the world.

Oddly enough, Jason and Caroline take turns being the sufferer and the suffered in their own relationship. At times, Caroline is the one on the losing end. “’To have people think I permit her to stay out of school and run about the streets, or that I cant prevent her doing it…Jason, Jason […] How could you. How could you leave me with these burdens’” (182). But mostly it is Jason who is dealt the worse hand. “’I know I’m just a trouble and a burden to you,’ she says, crying on the pillow” (181). “’I hate to do it,’ she says. ‘To increase your burden by adding Quentin…’” (219). The shifting burden represents the shifting leadership and responsibility for the family. Caroline relinquishes all power as she accepts Jason as the head of the household. He becomes a man, the leader, and less of her son.” ‘But it’s my place to suffer for my children,’ she says, ‘I can bear it’ (220).  A mother takes on pain for her children’s sake. Yet in their new roles, Caroline can only add Jason with more suffering and burdens.

How can you win if your own mother is working against you? She reinforces the idea that Jason is only like his father in name – they are not “flesh and blood.” By isolating Jason from his siblings at a young age, Caroline effectively isolates him from the rest of society. Her constant noise about burdens and suffering predisposes Jason to expect that from the world. If it weren’t for his mother Jason might have stood a fighting chance. But with her in his life he’s already committed to losing the battle.