Miss Quentin

Quentin is the daughter of Caddy Compson and is named after her uncle Quentin. It is unclear who her father is. Her mother, away from home, sends Quentin to the Compson home to be raised. Readers of The Sound and the Fury encounter her as a teenager; Jason, on April 6, 1928, says that she is seventeen years old.

Quentin does not seem to be happy with her circumstances: she constantly fights with her uncle Jason Compson, who, after the deaths of Mr. Compson and Quentin Compson, is head of the family. Her grandmother, Caroline Compson, locks her in her bedroom every night (73), and so she climbs down a tree near her bedroom window to meet men; Luster Gibson finds a tin package of condoms in a bush, prompting one of her suitors to, after hearing from Luster that men “comes every night she can climb down that tree, remark, “Damn if one of them didn't leave a track” (50).

The Compson Appendix says that Quentin escapes from the house by swinging from a rain pipe outside her window to the window of Jason's room, stealing nearly seven thousand dollars (much of which was money her mother had sent to her but was stolen by Jason) (346). The Appendix's assertion that she uses a rainpipe rather than the tree near her window is peculiar given that it is the tree she climbs down at night and the narrative attention given to the tree when everyone first discovers that she is missing:

“The window was open. A pear tree grew there, close against the house. It was in bloom and the branches scraped and rasped against the house and the myriad air, driving in the window, brought into the room the forlorn scent of the blossoms” (282)

It is unclear whether or not it was simply easier for Quentin to use the rainpipe to enter Jason's room or if Faulkner, who often did not reread his books once he had written them, simply forgot about the tree's presence and instead substituted a rainpipe in the Appendix, published in 1946, years after the novel's original publication in 1929.

Compsons

The Sound and the Fury