Shrevlin+(Shreve)+McCannon

"Quentin's Canadian roommate at Harvard, who helps Quentin put together the Sutpen story. He cannot understand the Southern mind, but his objective outsider's viewpoint (at times almost brutally) constitutes a solid contribution to the task that faces the two young men" (Kirk 90). Shreve's status as an objective outsider enables him to interject himself in Quentin's story in ways that a fellow southerner cannot. He speaks irreverently about the people and topics of Quentin's home and history. As Quentin's confidant, Shreve must also be aware of the mental decay that Quentin endures. Faulkner allows readers to observe the duo on two separate occasions only six months apart.

In January 1910, Shreve hears and reimagines Sutpen's story as Quentin tells it to him. One might expect Shreve’s imaginative recreations of the stories of Sutpen and Miss Rosa to be problematic to Quentin. But Quentin finds solace in Shreve’s ability to create a subjective story based on too few details. To Quentin, Shreve “sounds just like Father” (147). This comparison reveals that given the same knowledge about the event as his father, Shreve draws the same conclusions as an objective outsider. However, this one point does not (nor does it seek to) disprove Kirk’s claim that Shreve does not understand the Southern mind. It remains that there is a pride Quentin experiences that Shreve does not notice. Dobbs says of Quentin’s pride, “He can imagine himself among them--no doubt aided by the stories of his elders and the image of a marble soldier guarding the square in Jefferson. Pride in a code and shame at his inability to live up to the mythic past fill his mind with delusion and his lungs with water” (366). Quentin’s understanding and experience of his own southern pride is unknown to Shreve potentially through his ignorance of the clues Quentin leaves. This misunderstanding pushes him to ask Quentin (in one of the final lines in AA): “Now I want you to tell me just one thing more. Why do you hate the South?” (303).

On June 2nd 1910, Shreve pops in and out of Quentin's last day. He jokingly mentions a suttee but has no idea that a suicide is destined to happen at the end of the day. However, it cannot take much time living in a dorm with Quentin to realize that something is wrong. He forgets getting into a fight until he is bloodied and beat up. He cuts classes regularly and walks about town running strange errands in a suit. He gives obscure answers to simple questions about his daily plans. One can only imagine how he appears to others while his stream-of consciousness forces him to relive the past because the texts do not depict him from another’s point of view during these long and repeated instances. The suicide was foreshadowed by a joke about a form of ritual suicide once committed by Indian widows. Although it is hard to gauge what Shreve actually knows about Caddy and Quentin, suttee is a fitting comparison for the suicide that Quentin thought would preserve the social moral values he cherished.

Works Cited

Dobbs, Ricky Floyd. "Case study in social neurosis; Quentin Compson and the lost cause." Papers on Language & Literature, vol. 33, no. 4, 1997, p. 366+. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com. Accessed 17 Apr. 2017.

Faulkner, William. //Absalom, Absalom!// New York: Vintage International, 1990. Print.

Kirk, Robert Warner. __Faulkner's People: a Complete Guide And Index to Characters In the Fiction of William Faulkner.__ Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963.