Why is quentin obsessed with time

In reality Quentin could never fight Ames because that would be dishonoring his code of chivalry- southern gentlemen do not fight.

Caddy serves as the object of obsession with her brothers including Quentin. In addition to Quentin being obsessed with Caddy he is also jealous of her. For example, Quentin recalls a time when Spoade, a Harvard senior, mocked his virginity. This conflict causes Quentin to think about how Caddy is not a virgin anymore. Perhaps Quentin supposes that if he, like Caddy, was not a virgin then he would not have been taunted by Spoade.

Quentin remembers a time when he told Mr. Therefore, Quentin recalls a time when he suggests to Caddy that they need to commit suicide. RSS feed for comments on this post. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email.

The question is, what caused him to commit suicide? Quentin is the only character in the novel who is concerned with honor, with justice, and with love; he is the only one who searches into the intricacies of life and attempts to find some ordered meaning from life. He is the only Compson who feels pride in the family's once-noble past and the only one who feels the need to discover some reason for the family's present downfall.

In his monologue, Quentin tries to overcome the destructive, nihilistic philosophy advocated by his father and to discover some meaningful values in life by which he can live and affirm rather than negate the existence of humanity.

But every time he tries to do something positive, he is reminded of some negative statement made by his father. Quentin wishes to reject his father's philosophy, but the world he lives in seems constantly to affirm Mr. Compson's view of the world. Dalton Ames said that all women are bitches; Mr. Compson said the same thing in different words. Gerald Bland treats all women as bitches, and Mr. Compson says that all women expect to be mistrusted. Quentin looks at life, and everything he sees seems to reaffirm Mr.

He finds a little girl in a store, spends most of the day trying to take her home, and finally gets arrested for attempting to kidnap her. Some world, huh? In fact, as a boy, all he has to say is "she," and his father knows exactly why he came home with a black eye. No sex. No incest. As he thinks, "If it could just be a hell beyond that: the clean flame the two of us more than dead. Then you will have only me then only me then the two of us amid the pointing and the horror beyond the clean flame" 2.

What he wants, in other words, is a way to stop the course of history. The desire to "save" Caddy, however, is complicated by a rather reductive notion of how women function in the world.