Lochinvar

In the second section of TSAF, as Quentin's increasingly manic thoughts move back and forth in time, he recalls memories of driving in the car that Caddy’s fiancé Herbert Head has bought for her, and Head's reference (or Quentin's imagined memory) to “Young Lochinvar” riding out too soon. The remark is both sarcastic and ironic, as it highlights Quentin's actual weakness in being able to stand up to either Dalton Ames (fainting) or Herbert Head to save Caddy and protect the family honor. Lochinvar, the mythical avatar of his noble Scottish heritage is the anti-Quentin. Only in his imagination can Quentin be a valiant knight. Joseph Blotner’s notes for the Vintage edition of TSAF refer to Sir Walter Scott’s poem //Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field//, Canto Fifth, stanza XII (350). In Scott’s poem the gallant young knight Lochinvar rides out of the west to save his beloved who is being married off to another. At the wedding reception (he is too late to stop the marriage) he dances her out the door and onto his horse and away: []

It is not surprising to find that Quentin has read Sir Walter Scott, Faulkner certainly has. Scott was a popular author in the South, his romantic poems and tales of chivalric honor supporting the cavalier myth of knightly chivalry and noble aristocratic heritage held by plantation families for generations and especially central in the nostalgic stories of the Old South during Reconstruction. (William Faulkner Encyclopedia 368)

In lectures he gave at the University of Virginia, Faulkner spoke of Scott’s influence on the South, especially during Reconstruction, and specifically on Quentin as a romantic-minded individual: [].

Quentin holds onto the past and the belief that he is of aristocratic heritage and even fantasizes incest, marriage, and eternity in hell with Caddy as his chivalric act to purify and preserve the family legacy. As his thoughts and sentences disconnect and disintegrate, his role of chivalrous knight is gone, along with the family honor (and wealth) and his end in suicide is all that is left for him to stop time.

“//Young Lochinvar rode out of the west a little too soon, didn’t he?//” (TSAF 93)