1. What do you make of Quentin’s obsession with his watch in the beginning of the chapter?  What does the watch signify for Quentin?  What other evidence can you find from the early part of the chapter of his obsession with time?
2. How does Quentin’s sense of time compare to Benjy’s?
3. Trace one or more of the following images across the entire chapter: clocks/time, shadow, water, blood.  How is/are the image/s deployed?  What do they tell us about Quentin and his mental state?
4. Why is incest with Caddy a fitting “solution” (if only in fantasy) to Quentin’s problems?
5. What does Quentin desire throughout this section?  What is/are the central motives that drive him?
6. What are some of the ways the past impinges on the present in the latter part of the chapter?  What is the significance of the subplot in which Quentin is followed by the Italian immigrant girl?  The fight with Gerald?
7. How do you read the last remembered (or perhaps fantasized) dialogue between Quentin and his father on pp. 177-8?  What is the substance of the disagreement?  How do you read Quentin’s repeated use of the word “temporary”?

Questions on “Jason”:

1. The first line of Jason’s section is unforgettable: “Once a bitch, always a bitch, what I say.” How does this line a) evoke Jason’s characteristic concerns and temperament and b) imply contrasts between him and the prior narrators?
2. What is Jason’s relationship to time? How does it compare with his brothers’?
3. What is Jason’s relationship to work and money? What kind of job does he do? How does he understand the macroeconomic landscape of, for example, commodity markets and Wall Street? What is his more microeconomic attitude towards his own affairs?
4. What are Jason’s political views? Where does he locate himself within the body politic? Who occupies the “other side”?
5. To put together elements of questions 1 and 3, how do Jason’s obsessions with money and sex/gender/sexuality come together by the end of the chapter? What are some of the ways that money and gender intersect in his imagination?

Questions on “Dilsey”:

1. The narrative perspective shifts yet again in the final chapter, but this time we get a 3^rd-person perspective rather than another 1^st-person view.  What are some of the implications of this shift?  Whose perspective is privileged in this 3^rd-person account?  How does Faulkner use the different perspective to round out the portrait of the Compson family?
2. Time emerges as a central theme in this chapter, as in all the others.  What is Dilsey’s relationship to time?  How do we know? What are the implications of the linkage of the “beginning” and the “end” forged by Dilsey via Shegog’s sermon on 297?
3. Unpack the scene in which Quentin’s flight from the Compson home is discovered.  What are some of the ways that the past “is never dead” and “not even past” in this scene, to quote Faulkner’s famous statement on history?
4. How do you read the end of the novel?  How do you interpret the relationship between order and disorder at the end?  What associations emerge with each of the following objects/elements: Luster’s driving, the Confederate statute, the “boneyard,” Jason’s rage, Benjy’s groan?