Molly Gendelman
Professor Allred
Blog #2

Jason Who?

I was torn over whether I could like the character Jason. One part of me disliked the character Faulkner made him exactly out to be: Cruel, manipulative, and apathetic. The other part of me felt nothing but sympathy for a guy left alone to deal with “caring” for the family. Of the four Compson children, it feels like he got the least attention. Benjy is mentally ill, Caddy is the only girl, and Quentin is smart enough/special enough to be sent to Harvard. He is rarely mentioned in Benjy’s and Quentin’s sections, and the mother only seems to give attention to him when he is older and she becomes more dependent on him. So his quiet, cutthroat demeanor does not come as a big surprise to me.
His section is all about him, his sufferings, his misfortunes, etc. He only speaks of Benjy to complain about him being an embarrassment and another mouth to feed. He barely mentions Quentin (his brother), so initially I thought he really does not think much about his brothers. But then one line stuck out to me, “Sometimes I think what’s the use of anything. With the precedent I’ve been set I must be crazy to keep on” (235). It immediately reminded me of both Benjy and Quentin, how they were “crazy” in their own separate ways. This is in a stream of consciousness, thoughts not said out loud, and I think he references his brothers without even knowing it.
His relationships with Caddy and Quentin (his niece) are complicated for me to understand. He tries to make it clear he hates that he has to support Quentin, even though he keeps the money Caddy sends specifically for her. Her actions only anger him if he thinks they’ll reflect poorly on him, and from his perspective it does seem like she is a handful. At the same time, he was still put in charge of caring for her, in addition to his mother, his dying father, Benjy, the servants, and Uncle Maury who is always taking money from his mother. I can see why he has such a hard outer shell, so I am empathetic to some of his anger, but Faulkner did an extremely good job of making Jason’s character unlikeable. At several points throughout his section I found myself thinking that something might be mentally wrong with him, similar to his brothers, but unlike them he is able to function with it. He is extremely paranoid, and this can be seen clearly on page 233: “Like a man would naturally think, one of them is crazy and another one drowned himself and the other one was turned out into the street by her husband, what’s the reason the rest of them are not crazy too. All the time I could see them watching me like a hawk, waiting for a chance to say Well I’m not surprised I expected it all the time the whole family’s crazy.” Perhaps he is aware there is a similarity between himself and his brothers, despite how hard he tries to deny and hide it.  In the end I am still not sure what to think of Jason’s character, but maybe Faulkner wanted that reaction on purpose.