I am starting to enjoy the novel more and more as I read, especially now, having read the Quentin section and started the Jason section, as the story is actually starting to unravel. The Benjy section along with some of the Quentin section I found to be rather stagnant. Faulkner gets across the point that the family has issues, but other than that he just gives us slight hints of what might happen/have happened. With his intense style my mind skipped over the possible significance of many of these hints, which only gain meaning when you have gotten farther into the novel.

Now, onto what I actually thought of the going-ons of the Quentin section. The first half boring, depressing, and confusing; the second half interesting, depressing, and funny at times. Yes Quentin was depressed and it certainly showed, this also just happened make it excruciating to read at certain points. But, as I stated earlier, this was when I started to enjoy the novel more. Not because I enjoy Quentin’s inner pain, or even because I like Herbert, I enjoyed it because all of the new characters who weren’t just miserable Compsons.

Spoade, Shreve, Gerald, Gerald’s mom, even Dalton Ames were all pleasant surprises, as I thought all the characters would have been introduced by this point in the novel. Quentin’s classmates and classmate’s mother add a sense of humor that I believe was missing earlier in the novel. Even though the book is meant to deal with serious topics, a little humor is always nice and is executed excellently. Dalton Ames I enjoyed just because of the sincerity he spoke with. He has in Quentin’s opinion defiled Caddy and seems like an easy target to point at for many of the resulting problems, but after his conversation with Quentin I came away liking the fellow. This I think shifts the reader’s focus to Caddy as the source of the problem, with Dalton Ames just being a catalyst, where as if he was a total asshole we would place the majority of the blame on him. What made it so I could enjoy all of these characters was that the novel actually became easy to read. Many of the scenes were longer and more linear than anything before.

Some of the longer understandable scenes gave good looks into Quentin as a person. The one I really enjoyed was when he met the foreign girl in the bakery, who like Caddy had been before was young and innocent. There were parallels of course with him referring to her as sister, her getting dirty, in the end costing him and ending up in what appeared to be an unhappy situation, but that was not what I enjoyed. I liked the simple interaction between the two who could not communicate verbally. This seemed to be how Quentin wished Caddy could have been. The girl followed him and ate his buns and was unhappy to leave him.

Good results this week hopefully more next.
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