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cept of time or place. Most of his memories involved his sister, Caddy, who was the central character of the novel. Benjy’s earliest depicted memory, from 1898 (when Benjy was three years old), established the essence of her character—the children were ignorant of the death of their grandmother, Damuddy, and Caddy was the only Compson child brave enough to climb the pear tree and looked through the window at the funeral wake while her brothers standed below, gazing up at her muddy drawers, which were soiled earlier when they were playing in a creek adjoining the Compson estate. Most of Benjy’s other memories also focused on Caddy, who alone among the Compsons genuinely cared for Benjy. Key memories regarding Caddy include a time when she used perfume, when she lost her virginity, and her wedding. Benjy also recalled his change of the name (from Maury to Benjamin) in 1900, his Brother Quentin’s suicide in 1910, and the sequence of events at the gate, which leaded to his being castrated, happened also in 1910. The second section recounted the story from Quentin Compson’s perspective. Even though the present-day of this section was almost eighteen years prior to the present-day of Benjy’s section, it nevertheless followed roughly the chronological development of the novel, for while many of Benjy’s recollections were of their early childhood, most of Quentin’s flashbacks recorded their adolescence, particularly Caddy’s dawning sexuality. Quentin’s section took place on the day he commited suicide, and the present we followed his wanderings around Boston (he is a student at Harvard University) as he fastidiously prepared for his death. Like Benjy, he was obsessed with the past and frequently lapsed into flashbacks. Unlike the fairly discrete narratives of Benjy’s multiple memories, Quentin’s were much more fragmentary—a repeated word or phrase early in his section often recured later with greater detail and embellishment. Quentin’s flashbacks also were much more intellectual than Benjy’s. Benjy recorded mainly sensual impressions, Quentin often delved into more abstract issues such as character motivation, guilt, honor, and sin. The source of Quentin’s horror was Caddy. Hearkening back to antebellum views of honor, Southern womanhood, and virginity, Quentin could not accept his sister’s growing sexuality, just as he cannot accepted his father’s notion that “virginity” was merely an invention of men. Most of his flashbacks concerned directly his involvement in Caddy’s sexual maturing, but ironically they depicted also just how ineffectual Quentin was. In an attempt to restore “honor” to Caddy and to the Compson family, for example, he confronted Dalton Ames, who may be the man who impregnated Caddy, but Quentin was easily overpowered by Ames—and in the present, when he mistook a fellow student for the adversary of his flashback, Quentin was beaten up. In another incident, Quentin proposed a suicide pact with Caddy, but ultimately he could not go through with it. Section three was told by the third Compson brother, Jason, and was set on Good Friday. Unlike his brothers, Jason cared much more on the present, offering fewer flashbacks. The tone of Jason’s section was set instantly by the opening sentence: “Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.”(Faulkner 192) Jason was a sadist, and his grimly humorous section revealed just how low the Compson family had sunk—from Quentin’s obsessions over heritage and honor and sin to Jason’s near-constant