Quentin and Incest

Many readers believe that Quentin has sex with his sister, Caddy, but this is simply not true. One reading of why he would think of incest is that he cannot reconcile Caddy's sexuality with his own lingering virginity, so he wants to tell their father that they have committed incest so that they can “go away amid the pointing and the horror the clean flame” (149). Doing so would give Quentin some control over Caddy's sexuality as well as erase, at least in others' minds, the fact that he is a virgin. Faulkner, in his Compson Appendix, writes that Quentin “loved not the idea of the incest which he would not commit, but some presbyterian concept of its eternal punishment” (335).