Love Each Day

The passage I choose to write about for my blog can be found on pages 150-153 of “The Sound and the Fury”

It is the scene where Caddy and Quentin are down my the water talking about Caddy’s sexual activity.  They talk about how Caddy lost her virginity and how she is a promiscuous girl.  Quentin questions Caddy about the night she lost her virginity.  As the scene unfolds we see that they Quentin has a knife and he and Caddy have some sort of a suicide pact.  He plans to kill Caddy and then himself. I think he wants to do this because he is jealous of any guy that is able to have Caddy.  He wants Caddy to himself and that is it.  Quentin feel that since they can be together in life that in death they can.  The knife and the suicide pact in this scene somewhat represents Quentin’s desire to have sex with Caddy.  They way that Faulkner portrays this scene with the knife makes it sound like the two of them are talking about having sex.  The words he uses can go for either situation, suicide or sex.  Both Caddy and Quentin know that its is wrong to feel the sexual attraction between each other, yet they talk about it more than they should.   I think that this scene is a key aspect to understanding the relationship between Caddy and Quentin as well as the understanding Quentin’s suicide while he is away at school.

Well before reading the short stories that we did for class I didn’t like Hemingway’s work at all. After reading these three short stories I still do not like Hemingway. The first story, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, was too long and drawn out for my liking. It was very boring and had little relevance to anything in my own life so it made it much more difficult to read. The flashbacks also did no make this task any easier. It was confusing to go from what was present day to his past sporadically. It took me a while to figure out what was going on in the second story. I had an idea but couldn’t quite get the big picture when it came to subject of the two peoples’ conversation. I do have to admit that I found myself more into this story than any other Hemingway piece I have read. The third story was the most confusing to me. I had no clue what was going on. It seemed to be a bunch of babbling put together to make no sense at all to a normal person. I still have no idea what was really going on in the diner at all.