When Caddy becomes promiscuous in her teens it shatters Quentin's world.
He has romantic ideals about purity and virginity, repulsed by his own sexuality. The oldest child of Jason and Caroline, he suffers from his mother's coldness and substitutes his sister's love for his mother's. He has an affair with a married neighbor when the children are young, drinks before his brother-in-law's funeral, and is a bad businessman, having to ask Caroline for money to make investments. Uncle Maury BascombĬaroline's brother, he shares an unnaturally close relationship with her. She sees Caddy, Quentin and Benjamin as having "Compson blood" and Jason as being a "true Bascomb" and loves him more than the other children. She is passive-aggressive and manipulative, using guilt to force others to do her bidding. She sees her son's retardation as a curse on the family and changes his name from Maury (her brother's name) to Benjamin to try to cleanse herself of this curse. Caroline Bascomb CompsonĪ neurotic and hypochondriac, she is unable to mother her children properly or give them any love, leaving them to mother each other under the guidance of their housekeeper Dilsey. His view on Caddy's precocious sexuality upsets Quentin, who takes his statements to heart and kills himself in order to make sure that his pain over Caddy's betrayal never wears away with time. However, he is also not an ideal parent, too interested in intellectual, logical matters.
His wife Caroline is an ineffectual mother, and he does most of the parenting of the children when they are small. The head of the Compson family, he is an intellectual whose alcoholism finally kills him.
0 kommentar(er)
