LITCS 111
Teaching Associate: Patrick Mooney
Bldg. 494, room 160B
Spring 2016
Out of a quiet thunderclap he would abrupt (man-horse-demon) upon a scene peaceful and decorous as a schoolprize water color [...] the two separate Quentins now talking to one another in the long silence of notpeople in notlanguage [...] Yes. And by Quentin Compson.(4–5)
Then almost immediately he decided that neither was this the reason why she had sent the note [...]Quentin had grown up with that; the mere names were interchangeable and almost myriad. This childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence.(6–7)
He wasn't a gentleman. He wasn't even a gentleman. He came here with a horse and two pistols and a name which nobody ever heard before, [...](9–15)[...] It is from themselves that they need protection.
It was a summer of wistaria. The twilight was full of it and of the smell of his father's cigar as they sat on the front gallery [...] the stranger's name went back and forth among the places of business and of idleness and among the residences in steady strophe and antistrophe: Sutpen. Sutpen. Sutpen. Sutpen.(23–24)
So that when he entered the Methodist church that Sunday morning in his ironed coat, there were men as well as women who believed that they had only to look around the congregation in order to anticipate the direction his feet would take him [...] a man with a name of absolute and undeviating and even puritan uprightness [...] watched him pass along the street before the Holston House with a single formal gesture to his hat and go on and enter Mr Coldfield's store, and that was all.(32)
His was the curious position now. He was the solitary one. not Ellen. She not only had the aunt to support her, but the fact that women never plead nor claim loneliness until impenetrable and insurmountable circumstance forces them to give up all hope of attaining the particular bauble which at the moment they happen to want. [...] Mother was a stranger in Jefferson [...] her face that must have been there when Ellen's aunt departed.(41–42)
So for the first sixteen years of her life she lived in that grim tight little house with the father whom she hated without knowing it [...] a grim mausoleum air of puritan righteousness and outraged female vindictiveness [...] was passed.(47)
That summer she saw Henry again too. She had not seen him since the summer before [...] Because Sutpen was acting his role too. he had corrupted Ellen in more ways that one. He was the biggest single landowner and cotton-planter in the county now [...] He was not liked (which he evidently did not want, anyway) but feared, which seemed to amuse, if not actually please, him.(56–57)
Now Miss Rosa's life consisted of keeping it in herself and her father. [...] the aunt had raised her to believe that she was not only delicate but actually precious [...] and dated at two oclock in the morning.(65)
Ellen was dead two years now—the butterfly, the moth caught in a gale and blown against a wall [...] the wild blood which he had brought into the country and tried to mix, blend, with the tame which was already there [...] and protected by the ruthless and the strong.(66–67)
Because that's what a Southern lady is. [...] not that she is living on the actual blood itself like a vampire, not with insatiability, certainly not with voracity [...] foodbearing corpuscles sufficiently numerous and healthy in the stream.(68)
He must have known that Sutpen now knew his secret [...]. He is the curious one to me. [...] he (Bon) seems to have withdrawn into a mere spectator, passive, a little sardonic, and completely enigmatic.(73–74)
Yes, granted that, even to the unworldly Henry, let alone the more travelled father [...]. It's just incredible. It just does not explain. [...] performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, ipervious to time and inexplicable.(80)
(100–101)Yes,Judith said.Or destroy it. As you like. [...] while the block of stone cant be is because it never can become was because it cant ever die or perish. . . . . . .and your grandmother watching her, the impenetrable, the calm, the absolutely serene face, [...]